


Personal Motivations

by Sixthlight



Series: It Takes A Police Officer [4]
Category: Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch
Genre: Alternate Universe - Criminals, Alternate Universe - Leverage Fusion, Gen, Heist, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-07-08 00:06:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 41,181
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15918981
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: When Abigail Kamara gets hired for a new and interesting hacking job, the last person she expects to see is her cousin Peter, until last year a detective in the Metropolitan Police Service. Peter’s putting together a team - but the job turns out to be twistier than either he or Abigail realise…





	1. The Infiltration Job

Normally Abigail liked seeing her cousin Peter. He actually listened when she talked, some of the time, and occasionally he even knew things worth learning. But right now was _so_ not the time she wanted to talk to him, even if he wasn’t a police officer anymore. He’d still flip if he knew why she was here, and she was expecting her client to walk in the door any second now. There was a good possibility _they_ were going to freak when they realised the hacker they’d hired was a nineteen-year-old girl. There was only so much flipping and/or freaking she could handle in an afternoon.

Which would have been a fantastic pun if she hadn’t been thinking it to herself; she tucked it away for later, slouching over her laptop and tried to look as teenage and uninteresting as possible. With anybody else she’d have flipped her hoodie up but, see former police officer, that would have just got Peter’s attention.

When he sat down across from her, she thought that maybe she should have anyway; it might have worked. She’d heard, mostly from his mum, that he’d been really upset about losing his job, but he looked like he was doing okay. Or at least he was keeping up with haircuts and shaving, which were the first things to go when any of her other male relatives were having a bad time.  

“Abigail,” he said. “Doing some homework in peace and quiet?”

“Yeah,” she said, since apparently he didn’t know she wasn’t studying this year, and didn’t close the laptop, because: suspicious. But she did hotkey a couple of programs closed. “What about you – job interview?”

Which she realised as soon as she said it was stupid; he was in a Keep Calm And Don’t Blink t-shirt and jeans instead of the suits he’d worn as a detective. Not job interview clothes at all, except maybe if he was interviewing to be a barista or something. She knew he’d worked a coffee kiosk once, but surely he could do better than that now, even after what had happened.

“Just meeting someone,” Peter said. “They were supposed to –” Then he stopped and stared at Abigail like he was seeing her for the first time.

“What?” Abigail said, and then she took in his t-shirt properly, and – no. Couldn’t be.

“That, uh,” said Peter, slowly, almost disbelievingly. “That drink you’re having looks good. What is it?”

“Double-shot moccachino with hazelnut syrup and whipped cream,” Abigail said, trying not to gape. Oh, shit. Oh, she was _so_ busted. Maybe the quitting thing was a ruse – maybe this was a sting – but of all forty thousand police in the Met, the odds that it would be _Peter_ –

“That sounds great,” said Peter. “Might get one myself.”

Abigail choked at that. “You hate syrup in your coffee!”

He glared at her. “Okay, let me try again: I might get a coffee I actually _want_ to drink myself, and then we’re taking this conversation somewhere else.”

Abigail thought about running, but he knew where she lived, literally, and her parents, and really, what would be the point.

“Why?” she asked. “It’s quiet enough in here. We’re out of the CCTV line of sight. And it’s totally legit that we’d spot each other and have a conversation.”

“It’s a nice day,” Peter said. “I was planning on going for a walk anyway.” With whoever had shown up, was what he meant. “I’m going to go get that coffee. Don’t go anywhere.”

Abigail wasn’t planning on it.

*

She hadn’t _meant_ to get into a life of crime, exactly – when she thought about what her dad would think of it, or even her mum, it still made her cringe a little, on the inside. Even if they didn’t really ask where she got money for things; her dad always said “Oh, Abigail, she’s so smart, you know – people get her to fix their computers and things for them, protect them against hackers. There’s a lot of money in that these days.”

And it had started out as that, mostly, but she’d been bored and there were things she wanted to do that needed equipment she just couldn’t scavenge or borrow or build. Contrary to the movies, DDR-RAM chips and solid-state hard drives were not commonly found in your average council estate rubbish skip, and stuff like a decent black VPN server cost money to use, you couldn’t just magic one up yourself.

On the Internet, though, nobody knew she was a teenage girl, they just knew what she could do. So she’d picked up the odd black hat job here and there, mostly stuff like hacking databases for ID data and credit card numbers. She’d stayed away from anything like ransomware because that was both boring _and_ pointless. The really fun stuff was government – most companies were too cheap to spend money on real security and any kind of targeted attacks tore through them like wet paper, also boring – but that was also the kind of thing that got you either locked up or recruited to work for public service pay in a cubicle somewhere.

Abigail wasn’t interested in either of those things; she was nineteen and even with her A-levels they hadn’t quite been able to make uni work this year, with the fees now and two older siblings and the thing with her mum’s car and her dad’s hours getting cut, but next year. Next year she could definitely afford it. A university degree would open doors for her that would shut when people saw her face, otherwise. Only white boys got hired by Google off the strength of their Github repositories. Everybody else had to have papers.

Then this job had come in, specifically for someone local to London, and she’d gone back and forth on it fifty times before agreeing to meet and talk through it – face-to-face was dangerous, but she figured she could just not speak up if she didn’t like the look of it. She’d picked somewhere she came reasonably often, somewhere it wasn’t unusual for her to be. It had sounded, really, like too much fun to pass up – something different from the usual moving numbers around. But when her contact had walked in the door of the café, of everybody in all of London – all of the U.K., even – it had turned out to be Peter: her favourite cousin, if she had to pick one. Much more importantly, until last year, her only cousin who was also a detective in the Metropolitan Police Service.

What the actual fuck.

*

To give Peter credit, after a couple of probing questions to check it really was her he’d set up the meeting with, he didn’t hesitate; he launched straight into the details of the plan, or at least as much of the plan as he was willing to tell her. They left the coffee shop and walked as they talked.

“Let me get this straight,” Abigail said. “Some consultancy think tank bunch of Oxbridge wankers has a bunch of physical assets they keep in a warehouse, including some very valuable old books, and we’re going to steal them and hock them off. You’ve got someone to go in there, and someone for physical stuff, and me to deal with the alarm systems, but what exactly are you contributing to this?”

“The plan,” he said. “And keeping everybody pointed in the same direction.”

“No offence,” she said, “but how do you even _know_ people who pull these sorts of jobs? You’re a cop. You were a cop.”

“Exactly,” he said. “You do my old job for long enough, you get to know people. Actually the Met worries about that a lot; it’s why they rotate people in and out of Organised Crime, and around different parts of it.”

“They didn’t rotate you fast enough, then,” said Abigail.

“Something like that.”

Abigail stopped walking. They were high on Hampstead Heath; the city was spread out below them. “I don’t believe that.”

“You don’t want to do the job,” Peter said, “I’ll get somebody else. There’s time.”

“I’m doing the job,” Abigail said. “But, _apart_ from my share of the profits, the deal is that you tell me why we’re really doing this. Because I don’t buy for a second that you just decided you liked the other side of the fence better. And if this is, like, some personal revenge bullshit, that could go really wrong really fast, so I want to know about it.”

“It’s not personal,” Peter said. “And it’s not about how I lost my job. Well, not directly. But it is something that’s worth doing for more than just the money. I’ll explain why when it gets to it.”

“Your other people. Do they think that?”

“Ummmmm,” said Peter. “Not exactly. But they’re in, so you don’t need to worry about that.”

“You going to tell me who they are?”

“Not if it’s not necessary.”

“Any of them on the inside?” Abigail asked, trying not to roll her eyes; that was probably legitimate need-to-know stuff, not just Peter trying to keep her out of the worst of it. “If it’s going to work the way you say, we need someone on the inside, or someone who can get in.”

“Yeah, there’s someone,” Peter said. “But I’m _definitely_ not telling you who that is, yet.”

“You might have to,” Abigail said. “For the first part, I’m going to need access to the building.”

“No,” he said, instantly.

“Yes,” she said. “Peter, I’m really good at this, but I can’t do actual miracles. If the system isn’t hooked up to the Internet, and if they’re even the slightest bit intelligent it’s not, I need physical access, which means I need into the building. I’m an adult – relax.”

“You can be tried as an adult, that’s why I’m not relaxed,” said Peter. “Mum would _dissect_ me if you – Jesus.”

“You want my expertise on this or you don’t,” Abigail said, looking him directly in the eye. There weren’t a lot of people who could stand up to her looking them in the eye and thinking firmly, she’d found.

“Fine,” said Peter. “Fine. But we’re still not burning my insider for that. We’ll have to do it another way.”

*

The thing Abigail found least impressive about the other way was that it involved her having to sit through some excruciatingly dumb “on-boarding” presentations at Finlayson Amberley, the consultancy where she was masquerading as –– well, being, really – a secretarial temp. Not under her real name, obviously.

“Grace, that’s very pretty...Otieno?” said her direct manager, a white woman even shorter than Abigail who covered it up with truly impressive heels –– impressive because she was walking in them without wobbling, which Abigail was barely managing in her own, much lower set. “Where’s that from?”

“Kenya,” said Abigail.

“Huh,” said the woman, defrosting slightly – she’d been giving Abigail dubious glances over the tops of her catseye glasses for, like, an hour now. “I never would have guessed, your English is so good. They have safaris there, don’t they. Did you get to see lions and things when you were growing up?”

“Only once,” said Abigail, which wasn’t even a lie because she’d been to London Zoo on a school trip when she was twelve. “But we moved here when I was still really little.”

“That’ll be suspicious,” Abigail had told Peter, when he’d explained his solution for this part of it to her. “If I go in and then I vanish –”

“It’s a two-week contract,” he said. “It’s a massive security risk for a financial firm but they’re cheap and up themselves enough to think they can handle it – they get rotating temps for the boring admin instead of hiring permanent people. We substitute you for whoever the temp company was actually going to send, they’ll never noticed the difference.”

“And who’s going to do all the hard work so the temp company don’t notice the difference?” Abigail pointed out. “Yeah, alright.”

“You won’t be on your own, either,” Peter added. “I told you –

“Someone on the inside.” Abigail nodded, hitching one leg up to sit more comfortably. “Why can’t they do this, then?”

“Hold on – you’re the one who said you needed in!” Peter’s tone was indignant, but his eyes were sharp.

“Whoever they are, they wouldn’t be as good as me anyway.” Abigail had been hoping for something of a hint on who Peter’s person was, but if he was going to be that way – fine. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t trust him; she just wished he trusted _her_ a bit more.

*

The real problem with the plan, it turned out, was that even if she was a temp this was the sort of posh-pretending-to-be-modern place where women were called girls and girls were expected to wear skirts and heels and do their faces or whatever, and Abigail didn’t object to that in particular, but it was something she’d skipped on learning past how to put on lip gloss and look after her own hair. Her mum had tried to teach her when Abigail was younger, girly bonding stuff, and Abigail hadn’t minded, but Mum had just got more and more frustrated that the makeup she bought didn’t look right on Abigail, even when it was the middle of winter, and they’d both given up. Abigail supposed she could have asked some of her other cousins or aunts, on her dad’s side of the family, but she hadn’t wanted to know enough to make the effort. She’d had better things to do with her time.

Which was how she came to be sitting in front of a mirror in an old warehouse with Peter’s friend Beverley Thames, who clearly knew how to do her own makeup and, presumably, could help Abigail with hers.

“What are you on this job, the image consultant?” Abigail had asked, a bit put out that Peter had suggested this before Abigail had even – but, the thing was, she hadn’t ever had to go into somewhere like this, had managed most of the really big stuff she’d pulled off sitting cross-legged on her bed in a t-shirt and track bottoms, or at worst, sneaking around in a hoodie so all people saw was some teenager. This was a whole different thing and it wasn’t the worst thing in the world to have help with it.

That didn’t meant she had to admit that.

“For right now, maybe,” Beverley had said. She had a cascade of exquisite braids. Abigail had never liked letting people touch her head, after the endless rounds of relaxing and straightening when she was a little kid, enough to get a hairstyle like that. “But mostly I’m going to be stealing things.”

“Physical security stuff?” Abigail asked, and Beverley nodded. “Cool. I’m strictly digital.”

“I know – Peter said. We should go over a couple of tricks before tomorrow, in case you get stuck somewhere.”

“I guess,” said Abigail, who really wanted to ask about lock picks. She’d watched YouTube videos but it wasn’t the same as having somebody show you, even if duplicating keys from pictures was easy enough nowadays that it was a hobby more than anything. Then again, she didn’t want to seem too interested. “How did you get involved, then?”

“I used to run into Peter on the job, now and then,” Beverley said. “And we got chatting to him at a party, once. Went from there.”

“On the job before or after…” Abigail figured she didn’t have to be specific.

“Both,” Beverley said, and changed the subject. “Okay, so the great thing about this stuff is that it’s _totally_ waterproof; the main problem is getting it off the next day.”

“I’m going to be doing office drudge work, not going swimming,” Abigail said, wondering who _we_ was. “Or bursting into tears in the loo or anything.”

“Well, you never know,” said Beverley. “Just saying.”

“Hang on,” Abigail said, something from earlier clicking into place. “You said Thames – you’re not related to Lady Ty, are you?” Abigail had heard things about her, like you did. They were mildly terrifying.

Beverley eyed her in the mirror for a long second. “Yeah, as it happens. But she’s not in on any of this.”

“Good,” said Abigail. This was feeling complicated enough already.

*

In the end, the actual infiltration – well, you couldn’t even call it that – was so boring Abigail couldn’t believe it; she went in, kept her head down, did tedious data entry, and sprinkled a few USB drives around the place. The first copy of her program called back to her laptop the second day she was there. People were so monumentally stupid about this stuff.

Of course, the first system she got access to wasn’t anything really useful, although she copied all the folders that looked like they had personal information to a spare hard drive just in case, and the second and third set as well. It was on the Friday, when the data analysts had all gone off to do their whiskey-tasting or whatever it was – one of them had invited her along and called her a bitch when she’d said no, so Abigail had made a note to hack his car on her way out – that she finally got into the secured systems. Someone on the actual security team, all two of them, had clearly picked up one of the USBs. It made you want to cry.

Abigail was just packing up her things, impatient to get home and start the real work, when someone approached her. She was white, like almost everybody else here, blonde, and walked like she owned the place. Abigail knew she’d seen her before but couldn’t remember where.

“Grace, right?” the woman asked.

“Yeah,” said Abigail. “Uh, can I help you with something?”

“Come with me for a second,” she said.

“Sorry, who did you say you were?” Abigail asked, as she followed behind. She took her bag with her; this didn’t seem right, and she was mentally mapping out the nearest exit when the woman said “I’m Lesley. Peter didn’t tell you I was here?”

That was when it clicked. Peter had had a friend Lesley when he’d been a copper, Aunt Mamusu had thought she was his girlfriend for a while and she hadn’t been too pleased about it either – Abigail wasn’t sure why – but then she’d left, before the whole thing with Peter had happened. Peter had said it was a shame, that she was really good at her job. Abigail had seen her once or twice but not met her properly, and anyway she’d been a little kid then. But she had to be Peter’s inside woman – too much of a coincidence, otherwise.

“You used to work with my cousin,” Abigail said cautiously, because just because it seemed like too much of a coincidence didn’t mean it definitely wasn’t one. “He didn’t tell me you were working somewhere like this now.”

“Of course he didn’t,” said Lesley, rolling her eyes. “He’s worried I’d have him on over getting his baby cousin involved, which I’m going to, the next time I see him.” She frowned critically at Abigail and it was a bit too much like some of her teachers at school, only sharper somehow. Ugh. Abigail couldn’t wait to not be a teenager. Not that it really made a difference but people cared about it anyway. Three more months, and it felt like about three more years.

“Should we really be talking here?” Abigail asked, not being careless enough to say _doesn’t this look suspicious_ when she was on the premises. There were definitely cameras, although she’d taken care of the key ones already. She hadn’t found audio yet – it was illegal anyway –– but she wouldn’t put it past these creeps and audio bugs were practically invisible these days.

“You’re going to help me with a project, that’s the excuse,” Lesley said. “We’ll have lots of time to catch up under the radar.”

“Cool.” Abigail relaxed a little. She did wonder what was in it for Lesley, but she’d grown up on an estate too, she remembered Peter saying that, and had to leave the Met the same as Peter, and look at all these rich wankers around them – no wonder she was willing to help out.

Besides the money. Abigail had learned to never underestimate the motivational power of large amounts of money. After all, it might not buy happiness, but only past a certain point, which Abigail had not yet reached. There were studies and everything.

*

Three days later, once Abigail was sure she had all the system access she needed – but a week before her temp job was up – they met for the first time to go over the plan for the day, all four of them. Well, technically except Lesley, but Abigail wasn’t sure the other two knew about her. “Good, everybody’s here,” said Peter when Abigail finally found the right room. Abandoned warehouses weren’t supposed to have this many internal doors.

“Except your mate Lesley,” said Beverley, and the other guy didn’t make a face, which he would if he didn’t know – extra people was practically the biggest no-no on this sort of job – so they both did know, after all.

“The less she knows about this end of it the better,” said Peter. Beverley shrugged in agreement. “Abigail, I don’t think you’ve met Thomas.”

“I have now.” The Nightingale - it had been hard not to choke when Peter had mentioned his name - wasn’t nearly as impressive in person as Abigail would have expected; just a slightly-taller-than-average white guy, though he apparently had a talent for making even a polo shirt look dressed up. She hoped they never had to do undercover together. He’d stick out even more than Abigail felt like she did.

He hadn’t done a double-take when she’d shown up, which boded well, and he shook hands with her like they were at a normal business meeting or something. Abigail could feel strength in his grip he wasn’t using, and some weird callusing.

“A pleasure to finally meet you,” he said.

“Uh, the same.” Abigail hopped up on a filing cabinet; Beverley was sitting on a table and Peter leaning back against the wall.

“Alright.” Peter pointed with something in his hand, and a projector Abigail had thought must be broken whined to life, a map fading in on the dented grey wall. “Aerial view of where we’re breaking into – Google updated their London scans last month, so it’s decently up-to-date.”

“I could get you better footage than that,” Abigail had to offer, because she wouldn’t hack military satellite data herself but other people _were_ that stupid. And once the data was out, it was out.

“I know you could,” said Peter.

“I could also do you a much better powerpoint than that,” she said when he clicked to the next slide.

Beverley laughed outright, and even the Nightingale smiled. “I’m starting to see why this is our first group meeting.”

“Yeah, I’ve never heard either of you mock me to my face before, this is a real change of pace,” said Peter. “First thing we have to deal with: surveillance. The thing about London is that there might be mass surveillance, but it’s not _smart_ mass surveillance…”

It took about an hour to go through everything, faster than Abigail had hoped. She had to give Peter credit – he was good at keeping _other_ people on track, even if Beverley and the Nightingale had to haul him in from his own verbal wandering once or twice.

“It doesn’t really matter where the books come from and how old they are,” Beverley was saying. “It matters that they’re valuable.”

“They’re valuable because of where – fine,” Peter said. “Someday I’m going to get you to say that to Dr Winstanley’s face. It makes a difference to how we have to handle them, though. You can’t go tossing these around. And they _really_ can’t get wet.” Nightingale frowned minutely at that; maybe he was interested in the actual targets, not just the idea of selling them? Abigail filed that away to think about.

“I figured that much,” said Beverley dryly.

“The one thing I want to know is how we’re shifting them on,” Abigail said. “You can’t just dump these on a second-hand shop, even in London; they need buyers.” She hadn’t thought of that when Peter had first gone over the plan to her, but she’d realised in the interim. Old books weren’t easy money.

Nightingale waved a hand. “We’ve got two people for that – an old friend of mine in Oxford and an old acquaintance of Peter’s. One of them approached us over their retrieval, actually.”

“An old acquaintance of my mum’s, really,” said Peter.

“Oh my _god,”_ said Abigail, shifting so the filing cabinet wasn’t digging into the same spot in her thighs. “You’re getting Elsie Winstanley to fence them? I’m not sure if that’s genius or the stupidest thing you could do.”

“It’s only stupid if Mum gets wind of it, which she _never will_ ,” Peter said ominously. “How do you even _know_ her?”

“Aunt Mamusu took me to interview her for a school project, like, years ago,” Abigail said. “How do you even know her?”

“Professional stuff,” said Peter, vaguely.

Beverley raised an eyebrow. “Professional here or…”

“Both,” said Peter.

“She and Harold have known each other for decades, anyway,” said Nightingale. Postmartin must be his Oxford guy.

Suddenly there was an ominous creak that had everybody on their feet, but it didn’t come again, and Abigail could hear the whistle of the wind out one of the broken windows, high up. The small room they were in didn’t have a ceiling; it was just a cubicle with pretensions, really.

“Meeting in an abandoned warehouse is so cliché,” Abigail said, once Nightingale had nodded, which seemed to be the signal for Peter and Beverley to relax. “Whose idea even was that? And how come it’s abandoned? This is a pretty posh area.”

“Mine,” said Nightingale. “Elements of the Russian mafia were using it until a few months ago, but then that particular branch collapsed in a petty bout of infighting -”

“Someone was sleeping with someone else’s wife, the usual,” said Beverley. “And then the people in charge all ended up dead or arrested, clever them.”

“That was some quite good police work, actually,” said Peter. “Give my former colleagues some credit.”

“Anyway,” said Thomas. “They’re not using it, nobody else wants to go near it just in case, so here we are. And we’re going to need storage space.”

Abigail frowned. “How do you know it’s not still being watched?”

“I checked that,” Peter said. “That’s what I got you to set me up HOLMES access for, with the MAC address mirroring and all that. One of the things, anyway.”

“It was _way_ more complicated than that,” Abigail informed him, because she didn’t want to undersell her abilities, here. “But OK. Wait – I thought you still needed a password for that. You got one?”

“Assistant Commissioner Folsom uses his daughter’s birthday,” said Peter, with a grin. “Which is _totally_ against organizational policy, not that he’s ever read it, I bet.”

“You’re using _Folsom’s_ account?” Beverley raised her eyebrows. “Ty’ll be _pissed_ if you get him in trouble.”

“You worried about that?” Peter asked her, cocking his head; she patted him reassuringly on the shoulder. “No, he’s a complete wanker. I’m fine with it.”

“Good,” said Peter. “Do we have anything else left to get into place?”

“We still need the schedule for the security guards,” said Thomas, pointing at the last slide. If Abigail was standing where he was she’d be slouching against the wall; he was standing ramrod-straight, still. Military, definitely, she thought. 

“It’s outsourced, I’m working on it,” said Abigail.

“I’ve got that covered,” said Beverley. “One of Maksim’s friends is working for that company now, since his previous employment fell through.” Thomas gave her a nod at that.

“One day you’re going to have to explain to me how the Russian mob tried to kidnap you and now you have one of them doing everything you say,” said Peter idly.

“One day I will,” said Beverley. “But not today.”

Did that mean Peter didn’t – Abigail almost said something, but bit her tongue at the last second. It wasn’t like she knew that much, anyway, and if Beverley was keeping it to herself….

Still. Huh.

*

Evening at Finlayson Amberley, and all the lights still on. Abigail lifted her head from her data entry in time to see another person slipping out the door at the egregiously early hour of seven-thirty pm – Greg, who sat in the far right corner under the air conditioning unit – and narrowed her eyes. Time to start making her way to the server room? To get full access to the system she needed, she was going to have to manually re-wire two of the racks, which was a pain. Still, it gave her some weird Stockholm Syndrome-ish pride in the company’s computer security policies, which weren’t _totally_ useless after all. Until now she’d practically felt insulted by them.

Yeah, time, she decided. She’d been keeping count and the only other person left in this section was another white guy whose name she hadn’t got yet, but he was one of the algorithm crowd, something to do with one of the big-data contracts this place had with the government, and it was impossible for people to get his attention even when they wanted it. He fended it off with noise-cancelling headphones and a total disdain for anybody he thought was more stupid than he was, which was everybody, but especially anybody he thought was female. Definitely time to –

Then one of the cleaners came in the far door, the one that led to the hall the server room was off, and Abigail groaned internally. That was so annoying. She left her cart parked just to the right of the doorway and came over to Abigail. That wasn’t annoying, it was concerning.

“Hi,” Abigail said. “Sorry, am I in the way?”

“There’s been some problems with the power in here when I run the big hoover,” the woman said. She had a Somali accent with the edges smoothed over, almost in a posh way. She was tall, really tall, with a neatly-pinned navy blue hijab that shimmered in a way that looked expensive. “It’s been tripping fuses. You might lose things -”

“I’m almost done,” Abigail said, and shut her computer down.

Here was the thing, though: Abigail had been learning from this job that white men would practically live in the office if you paid them enough and gave them free energy drinks and table soccer (even though they never used it), and that the cleaners didn’t come until after nine, usually, because by then even the most hardened had staggered off to the pub. She’d stayed late a few times herself to learn that. She hadn’t got paid overtime, of course, but nobody had even told her not to; they probably thought she was trying to show willing and maybe get a permanent job. Ugh.

It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet, and the cleaners who normally did this office were Polish, which had been a real relief because the way this was going she’d half expected Aunt Mamusu to show up. This woman was new, and early, and the thing about the vacuum was pure bollocks.

“Hey,” Abigail said, as she was packing up her things. “You don’t know my cousin Obe, do you? He usually does the posh flats but he’s had a couple of office cleaning jobs -”

The woman started, like she hadn’t expected Abigail to pay attention to her. “No, no I don’t, sorry.”

“You probably know some of the same people, though. What’s your name?”

“Awa Shambir,” said the woman. “I only moved back to London very recently, I’ve been in Manchester. I’m sure I won’t know him.”

“Oh, never mind then,” said Abigail. “Sorry, I’ll let you get on with it. Word of warning – that bloke in the corner totally hates being disturbed, he might make you come back.”

The woman flashed a quicksilver smile. “I can handle it, but thank you.”

Abigail left the open-plan part of the office to the dulcet sounds of the cleaner asking the brogrammer across the room politely if he was done and the brogrammer swearing at her. Any real cleaner would have known her job would be gone after that. She walked down the hall, ducked around through the tearoom area and back at the other end before the lights – on an automatic movement sensor –– timed out, and hid herself under a desk. Down the other end of the room, brogrammer guy stomped out.

Abigail stayed very, very still. When the cleaner moved into view, she breathed as shallowly and quietly as she could, and got a couple of photos with her phone. Not a perfect view of her face, but you couldn’t have everything.

The woman didn’t even bother pretending to start vacuuming before she opened Abigail’s desk drawer.

“I promise it’s clean in there, I’ve only been here a week,” said Abigail, standing up. She didn’t raise her voice; she didn’t want to attract other attention. “What are you doing?”

The woman didn’t freeze, like Abigail was expecting; she shut the door and turned around, smoothly. “Better question – what are _you_ doing?”

“My job?” Abigail said, folding her arms and giving her a look that had cowed teachers and bullies alike at school. “Guys like the one you just got to leave might not know who the cleaners are, but I do. You’re new. And cleaners don’t wear silk on the job, either.”

That just got her a petulant frown. “What are you, the…the filth?” There was the barest hesitation, like it wasn’t the word she wanted.

Abigail had a frozen second of _shit, what if_ she’s _a cop_ , then logic reasserted itself; a policewoman wouldn’t be pretending to be a cleaner, she’d have a warrant and show up during the day, and not by herself either. _If you go after somewhere like that, you do it – they do it mob-handed or not at all_ , Peter had commented when they’d been talking over this.

She laughed, and it sounded incredulous to her own ears at least. “Look, I just want to get a proper job, maybe enough to get out of my parents’ place, and if you’re nicking things they’ll blame me first.”

The woman looked at her for what felt like forever, and of course she hadn’t said anything about calling the cops, like she should have; shit. _Shit_. If she ever got booked, even once, they’d have her face and her fingerprints and then things got _difficult -_

“How about…I won’t get in your way if you don’t get in mine. And I promise I’m not here to do anything they’d blame on a temp.” Her voice shifted as she spoke; no Somali accent now, just pure RP vowels. What the hell, Abigail wondered.

It was too late, anyway, and she wasn’t going near the server room tonight. Her heart was hammering in her chest so hard she thought it must be audible halfway across the room.

“Fine.” Discretion was, Abigail decided, the greater part of valour here. She didn’t do face-to-face fights.

*

“I don’t know her,” Peter said, squinting like it was going to improve the resolution; Abigail had been carrying the kind of phone Grace Otieno would have, eighteen months old, and the angle hadn’t been that good either. “Have you -”

“I ran the name already, she doesn’t come up anywhere; I mean, nowhere, which makes it a shitty alias,” Abigail said.

“Wait.” Peter squinted some more. “Actually, take away the headscarf, I think I have seen her – but I’m buggered if I can remember where.”

“So have I, and I _do_ remember where,” said Beverley. “She’s got a title, I think, but I don’t know her name. What worries me is…” She trailed off, and Nightingale took up. “She’s got a very particular skillset, and it’s…extremely curious that she’d be anywhere near Finlayson Amberley.”

“What sort of skillset?” Peter asked.

“Nothing to do with what we’re doing here,” said Nightingale, and that was a brush-off; Peter’s eyes narrowed for just a second. Abigail was pretty sure she knew what he wasn’t saying, and really –

“Okay, then,” said Peter, which was worrying on at least three levels. “Abigail, how much longer do you need to be there, or are you going to come down with the ‘flu or something -”

“I’ve got to get into the server room,” Abigail said. “They keep the master key for the alarm system on – look, I’ve got to, I told you.”

“Odds are she thinks Abigail’s with your old lot, even though she said she wasn’t,” Beverley said. “Alias with no paperwork to back it up, gives up on her cover story nearly as soon as she’s pushed – she’s not professional.”

“Then odds are she never shows up there again,” Abigail said, “but I’m the one who has to walk in there tomorrow.”

“I’ll check in with our fifth column,” said Peter. “We’ll clear it before you go.”

“This is getting unnecessarily complicated,” said Nightingale.

“You have a better suggestion?”

“No.” He grimaced. “That's the bit I don’t like about it.”

*

“No need to worry about our friend Ms Shambir,” was the first thing Lesley said to her the next day; her actual job, Abigail had discovered, was as a PA for one of the senior management people – that was how she knew about the books in the first place – and Abigail was supposed to being doing data entry for her so she could do, well, whatever more important things a PA to senior management did. Abigail didn’t care that much; they all seemed pretty interchangeable, middle-aged white men in good suits. She’d bet none of them would have the first idea how to so much as write a line of code, or how the data analysis that underpinned their think tank actually worked. They were there for the bit of consultancy that involved lots of long lunches with the right people. They’d suspect her of nicking the petty cash jar, but never of breaking into their servers. Especially not in heels.

“Are you sure, though?” she asked Lesley.

“If she so much as gets within sight of the building security will be having a word,” Lesley said. “God, she can’t be very bright – she could have tried harder to make like she was a real cleaner. How’d you clock her, anyway?”

“She wasn’t one of the cleaners,” Abigail said, and Lesley just looked blank. “Haven’t you ever – anyway, what did you tell your boss, or security, or whoever?”

“Said I saw her lurking this morning. Nobody ever checks the cameras – it’s fine.”

“Alright.” Abigail made a mental note to install her wipe program today, not the end of the week. “I’ve still got to get to the server room tonight.”

“Won’t be a problem.” Lesley smiled at her, upbeat. “Everything’s going according to plan. Don’t you love it when that happens?”

“I don’t trust it when that happens,” said Abigail, but Lesley had a point.

“Then trust me.” Lesley straighten. “Got to get on with it – let me know if something else comes up.”

Abigail nodded, already thinking about the server room tonight, letting her fingers do the data-entry work without her brain getting in the way.

*

That evening, after she’d been in and out of the server room without so much as a glimpse of anybody, she made her way around the back of the building to the rubbish skips that lined the alley. It was dark and dodgy-looking and something gave a suspicious rattle, but that was what she was looking for.

“Hey,” she said. “Finding anything good?”

A fox popped up; it was a little larger than a regular London fox, maybe, but just a fox, otherwise.

“Come on,” Abigail said.

The fox sighed. “No. It’s all paper today. Fine if you want something to line a den with. Nothing tasty.”

“They’re having a big client do on Thursday,” Abigail said. “MPs and that sort of thing. There’ll be good leftovers then. Lots of cheese and crackers. Maybe some proscuttio.”

“That sounds more like it,” said the fox. “What are you doing here?”

“Work,” Abigail said. “Long story. Listen – have you seen a woman sneaking into this building? Really tall, East African, wearing a silk headscarf.”

“Do I look like I’ve been staking the place out? No.”

Abigail shrugged. “Worth asking. Something funny about her.”

“Speaking of that,” said the fox, “word is you’ve been seen in the same place as the Nightingale and that River he hangs around with. And their clever policeman friend.”

“He’s not a policeman,” said Abigail. “Not anymore. Whose word?”

“Just ours,” said the fox, and now Abigail thought about it, abandoned warehouses were probably prime fox territory. “I was curious, is all. You haven’t gone near the Rivers before.”

“And I’m still not,” said Abigail. “I’m not stupid. Bev’s just - this isn’t about River stuff.”

“Then what is it about?”

“Tell you when it’s all over, maybe.”

The fox laughed, a weird raspy sound. “Laters.”

“Laters.” Abigail waved as it whipped around the corner and out of sight, and wondered: did Peter _really_ not know about any of this? But it wasn’t something she could ask him, because if he didn’t, he’d think she’d lost it, and they were too close to the business end of this job to let him think she’d lost it.

She’d wondered that about herself, the first time a fox had talked to her, when she’d been thirteen and stupid and wandering about on train lines looking for the ghost someone at school had said haunted them. But she’d proven it to her own satisfaction and after that – it was just another corner of her city, the one where foxes talked and ghosts showed up now and then and apparently there were wizards, although Abigail had never had anything to do with wizards, unless you counted the Nightingale.

It was a shame. She’d like to learn magic, if magic was something you could learn. She’d never really got a clear answer on that, either.

*

Abigail still lived with her parents even though technically she could have moved out, because moving out would have meant flatmates – crime didn’t pay _that_ well considering London rents, or at least it hadn’t up until this point – and flatmates would have asked inconvenient questions. If, no, _when_ they pulled off this job, she was totally getting her own place, though.

She’d grown up on the same estate as Peter, although she’d still been in primary school when he’d legged it, not having the same worries about flatmates, apparently, so she hadn’t known him that well then. He didn’t visit his parents very much; not never, and more recently because his dad was getting sick, so Abigail’s dad had said – Peter’s dad was _old_ old, as old as Abigail’s grandparents – but still not much. Definitely not enough for Aunt Mamusu’s liking, Abigail had also heard, from Aunt Mamusu herself. She somehow kept tabs on everybody in her vast extended family. If anybody was going to figure out what Abigail actually did, Abigail had always figured, it would be her. She’d either take it in stride or come down on her like the wrath of God; Abigail still wasn’t quite sure which and planned to never find out.

So Abigail took notice when she was heading home from the Tube station and heard Peter’s voice. At first she thought he must be trying to get her attention, and then she had a spike of panic – why wouldn’t he just ring or text – and then she realized he was talking to someone else, but around a corner, where she couldn’t see him. She was going to brush by when she heard “– following me for a reason, Sahra?”

Sahra Guleed, Abigail knew, had worked with him in the Met; unlike Lesley May, _she_ was still police. Abigail tucked herself into the wall, and waited. She pulled out her phone so it just looked like she was waiting for someone.

“We’re a bit paranoid today,” said a voice Abigail didn’t know; female, a Londoner, not really old or young. “Then again, I would be too, after what happened to you.”

“What?” Peter sounded genuinely confused. “Oh, you mean – nah.”

“They practically stalked you, Peter,” said the woman – Sahra. “At least they lost interest when you left, didn’t they? Small blessings.”

“I think I deserve one or two,” Peter said, dryly, and Sahra chuckled like she agreed, but not like it was funny. “Visiting your parents?”

“Just on my way back from it. What brings you to my manor?”

“Same sort of thing,” Sahra said. “Look, I’ve been meaning to ask –”

“Can we not?” Peter sounded tired. “No offence, Sahra, it’s nice you care enough to check up, but I don’t feel like being checked up on today.”

“It’s not just me. The boss and the other boss are both wondering – nobody’s alright with how it went down.”

“But it went down, all the same.” Now Peter sounded the tiniest bit bitter. “Or I did, and it’s nice you’re all wondering, but I’m trying to get on with my life.”

“Right.” There was an awkward pause.

“I need to…” Peter said. Abigail debated what to do, and settled for pulling the hood of her puffy jacket up and rounding the corner, head still down and over her phone. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Peter, or Peter’s shoes and jeans; she couldn’t spot Sahra without looking obvious.

“Just,” Sahra said as Abigail was passing. “If you do – if they _didn’t_ lose interest, you’d let us know, right? We could help.”

Whatever Peter said was lost as Abigail moved on, but she raised her eyebrows at her phone. No bets taken on who _they_ were. Wasn’t that interesting.

*

“Did you stalk Peter?” she asked Thomas the next day, when they were going over the final plan. Abigail was already in her work clothes and looking heartily forward to the end of the week and her mysterious failure to have her temp contract extended. Looking ‘appropriate’ for Finlayson Amberley was almost as much of the job than the actual work she had to do. And her nylons itched.

“That’s a very strong word,” said Thomas, which was as ineffectual a denial as he could have possibly put up. “Did Peter say that?”

“One of his mates did,” said Abigail. “One of his cop mates.”

“Sahra Guleed?” asked Beverley. Abigail hadn’t even heard her come into the room. She really needed to get Bev to show her how to do that. Except probably she was never going to see her again after tomorrow. “She’s a little bit paranoid, sometimes. When were you talking to her?” Her voice sharpened.

“I wasn’t,” Abigail said. “I eavesdropped on her and Peter when they ran into each other near the estate. She grew up in Gospel Oak, I think it was legit. But there was this whole mysterious conversation about ‘them’, unquote, having ‘lost interest’, unquote, when Peter got dismissed. Or whatever the Met call it.”

“Oh, hmm,” said Beverley. “Yeah, that was probably us.”

“Peter hasn’t mentioned that,” said Thomas thoughtfully. He was saying it to Beverley, not Abigail.

"Of course he hasn't," said Beverley. Her mouth opened again, but then closed abruptly. Her eyes hadn't even flickered, but Abigail knew Beverley had something to say that she didn't want to say in front of her.

"Stalking," she said slowly and clearly, "is creepy. I don't mind illegal but I do mind creepy."

"We're not creepy!" Beverley objected.

"I think anything we say is going to be protesting too much," said the Nightingale. "Ask Peter, if you like."

"Like he's really going to tell me," said Abigail. "But you don't think this Guleed's going to get in the way tomorrow?"

"If there was a chance of that –" Beverley said, and then Peter walked in, so she stopped. It was as suspicious as it could be, but Peter didn't notice, because he was too busy saying "We might have a minor problem. I ran into Sahra Guleed yesterday and –" He paused, taking in the room. "Can someone tell me _why_ this was a topic of conversation before I even got here?"

"I overheard you guys," said Abigail. "Outside the Tube station. Nobody was stalking you."

"You really have been taking tips from these two," said Peter. Abigail scowled at him, because _she_ wasn't creepy, and Beverley scowled at him, presumably because she thought the same, and the Nightingale looked away. Peter made a face. "Look, it's not - it's a frame of reference thing. Can we focus? I ran into Sahra, and it was almost certainly a coincidence, but...maybe not."

"Too late to worry about," said the Nightingale. "There hasn't been any other sign of an ongoing investigation or extra security, and if it's the absence of such that concerns you - the police tend to be more interested in stopping illegal activity than conducting elaborate stings."

" _I_ know that," Peter said, with some emphasis. "It's less an operation I'm worried about and more –"

"You're the only one of us with any good reputation left to lose, at least in those quarters," Beverley filled in, more sympathetic than dry.

"Too late to worry about," said Peter, shrugging, that cheerful mask he wore sometimes coming back down. "That's not what we're here for. Pass those blueprints –"

*

The storage building their targets were in was near the Thames, not that common anymore, both because residential made more money and because people had really started to think hard about flood risks. But it meant that after the meeting, Abigail could walk down to the riverbank and look out across it at the building that she was never going to get closer to than this, if everything went right. Probably everything wouldn't go right. But she had a good feeling about _enough_ things going right, for this job.

The waters of the Thames were very still tonight, and she wondered what was lurking just below the surface. Not in a menacing way. Just…going about their business.

"Psst," said a voice from the bushes, but it was just Dan. "What're you doing here?"

"Just taking a walk. You?"

"The usual." He said that a lot, although what the usual was for a talking fox, Abigail had never quite worked out. "Listen, about that woman –"

"Who _are_ you talking to?" Peter asked from way too close behind Abigail. She was quite proud that she only twitched a bit and didn't audibly shriek. Clearly he'd been taking lessons from Beverley and the Nightingale on moving quietly.

"Just myself," she said on autopilot; the bushes rustled as Dan slipped away. "There was a fox."

"Not hard to find these days," said Peter. He looked around, but of course there wasn't anybody human in sight for him to see. "Wanted to get eyes on it?"

"Just, you know, before I'm doing things blind," Abigail said. "Walk-through would be better."

"I can't do miracles," said Peter. "Unlike some."

Abigail shot him a sharp look at that, but he just said "What? You practically can, if you've got a keyboard in front of you."

"It's not miracles," Abigail said, and didn't say, _you want to talk to the other half of the team about that_. "It's just hard work. And that I'm really good."

Peter grinned. "I know you are."

“What are you doing here, anyway?” Abigail asked, before he could push on the talking-to-herself explanation; a flicker in his eyes suggested he knew what she was doing, but he let it slide.

“Staring thoughtfully at our target,” he said. “Comes with the job. Lots of thoughtful staring.”

“Not your _job,_ not really.” His mouth tightened, and Abigail wished the words back, not something she often did. “Peter – why did you…why are we doing this, with, you know. Beverley. And the Nightingale. They’re…”

“I trust them,” Peter said. “For this, anyway.”

“They’re -“ Abigail said again, and Peter gave a tight smile. “Criminals? So what does that make you? Is that what you’re asking?”

“What does that make _you_?”

She wasn’t even sure how she meant it; who knew which way Peter took it. His face wasn’t giving anything away.

“I’m setting some things right,” he said. “You knew that when you took the job.”

“Stealing old books is setting things right,” Abigail said, not able to keep her scepticism out of her voice. “You told me it was about more than a profit, but you haven't told me how.”

“It’s not that I don’t trust you.”

“So?”

“I’ll tell you the whole thing,” he said. “After tomorrow. You’ll need to know for the second half, anyhow.”

“ _Second_ half?” Abigail put her hands on her hips and glared.

“After tomorrow,” Peter said. “Cross my heart.” He looked out across the river again. There was a splash, somewhere just out of sight, near where the water slapped against pilings and stone. It was the wind, Abigail hoped.

“Fine,” said Abigail. “I’m going to go get some sleep. Some of us have work nine to five right now.”

“Hey, that was your idea.”

“Don’t remind me.”

She looked everywhere she could think of, on the way home, but she couldn't find Dan again. She wondered what it was he’d wanted to say.

*

In the movies, when people stole stuff, they did it in the middle of the night. They even hacked things in the middle of the night, which was more true than the other bit because something about hacking tended to attract the kind of person who woke up at noon even without the excuse of a shift job. Also, there were way fewer sysadmins logged in at two in the morning, unless everything had been outsourced to India, in which case there were lots of sysadmins and you might as well do your thing during the workday.

Also, if it’d been outsourced, odds were they weren’t good enough to spot whatever it was you were doing. Not because there weren’t perfectly good network admins in India, but because the kind of idiots who outsourced the most crucial parts of their IT department to another continent to save a fraction of what they’d lose if they had a breach didn’t know enough to hire the good people. 

Anyway, according to Peter - who was running this job and therefore got to make these decisions - stealing things in the middle of the day was often just as good a plan, because alarms weren't set, people were expected to be coming and going, and you could practically just walk out of buildings with things. In this case, someone _was_ actually going to just walk out of the building. Hooked into the network here, Abigail had created a fake shipment order for the books and overwritten the master key to re-set the alarms. Beverley would arrive and pick them up, with Abigail overriding any confirmation requests, Nightingale would drive the van, and tomorrow night – this bit _did_ work better in darkness –– there would be a crude attempt at a smash and grab, at which point the books would be discovered to be missing. Their actual removal the day before should pass unnoticed.

Properly they should also have walkie-talkies, but obviously that wasn’t going to work when Abigail was in an office, so she’d set everybody up with Bluetooth earpieces and a group VOIP call on Signal. They still couldn’t say anything totally obvious like “let’s commit this theft now”, because odds were the GCHQ and by proxy the rest of the Five Eyes SIGINT crowd were capturing the packets anyway to decrypt at leisure, but this wasn’t something that SIGINT agencies were interested in, and who even talked like that, anyway.

She’d asked Peter if she should set Lesley up with one too, and he’d said “yeah, why not, she can call in if there’s a problem”, so she’d done that first thing this morning.

“This is going to be obvious,” Lesley had said when she’d been handed an earpiece. “My hair doesn’t do…that.” She’d waved at Abigail’s neat bun, which was only just starting to friz; Abigail hadn’t relaxed her hair voluntarily _ever_ and was counting the days until it wore off.

“You wish your hair did this,” Abigail said. “Just wear your hair loose, nobody’ll notice it.”

“Well, alright, but I can’t promise I’ll have it in all the time.” Lesley frowned.

“Just for emergencies,” Abigail had said. She’d never been a Brownie or anything but it didn’t hurt to be prepared.

*

Abigail had never tried to pull something like this while sitting in an office before, but she’d grown up with an older brother and an inquisitive mother; looking over your shoulder before you opened up something on your screen that you didn’t want people to see was for beginners. She flipped open the shiny metal case that had once contained a protractor-and-compass set and now had a collection of pencil stubs and Abigail’s favourite biros – the pens here were _terrible_ -  and propped the lid up against the small-footprint computer case padlocked to her desk. Nobody was passing behind her without her seeing it.

Preparations complete, she opened up the VM she'd set up and got to work.

“Alright, everybody,” said Peter in her ear. “Are we good?”

“Check,” said Beverley.

“Roger,” said Nightingale.

“Mmm-hmm,” said Abigail, chewing on a thumbnail.

Most of her part of the job had been prep work. The collection of antique, rare, expensive books they were after was currently in the physical if not strictly legal possession of one of the managers here, the one Lesley answered to. They were inexplicably listed as a company asset, probably to keep them from being linked to him personally; Abigail would lay money on him having acquired them extra-legally to start with, which made it only fair that they were going to lift them.

Being a company asset, and the company being short on cash right now, Abigail had faked up a sale. In most circumstances she would have done a corresponding email trail as well, but there wasn’t any point here; all they needed was enough documentation that when Beverley arrived at the other site today with a man in a van and some official-looking paperwork, it passed inspection. Technically you also needed a physical pass to get into the building, but nicking that was Bev’s job.

She could hear Beverley making small-talk with somebody through the earpiece, sounding genuinely interested in the woman’s garden and some birds that had apparently taken up residence there.

“Come on, Bev,” Peter muttered, but it was only barely audible; Abigail let herself smirk, because it wasn’t like anybody was there to see it.

She flicked Windows and desultorily did some data entry, keeping up appearances, for about five minutes before Beverley said “Got it,” in tones of satisfaction.

“Time to bring the van around?” Nightingale asked.

“Give it ten,” said Beverley, and then more loudly, “Hi, I’m here about –”

Abigail had given herself a hangnail by the time the boxes were being loaded into the van, mostly at the points they were going over the sale docket; she’d brought up the security cameras from the other site and it was an effort not to micro-analyse every twitch on the face of the man paging through it. She was good, and she’d had plenty of material to work off, but you never knew. Weirdly, however, the manager at the other site seemed more than willing to believe everything Beverley said – okay, maybe not that weirdly. Abigail had heard stories. Beverley herself didn’t look even slightly worried at any point.

“And we’re loaded up,” Nightingale said, half an hour later that felt like about a thousand years.

“I’m staying for a coffee,” said Beverley. “Go on without me, I’ll meet you there.”

Abigail stayed in the security system just long enough to set up the faux-ransomware exploit that would wipe the CCTV footage for the last two weeks – all they kept – overnight. It was a nice little zero-day exploit that patches were being rolled out for next Tuesday on Windows machines, an early copy of the press release was making the rounds, so it was now or never to use it, really. And they’d be so relieved when all they lost was half their data instead of all of it.

“Are you sure about that?” Peter was saying to Beverley. “Thomas might need you to get into the storage spot –”

“That’s true,” said Nightingale. “When I deal with a lock it’s somewhat obvious it’s been dealt with.”

“What do you do, punch it out?” Abigail asked.

“Something like that,” he said.

Peter made a skeptical noise. “Bev, c’mon.”

“Fine,” Bev muttered, and made normal-volume excuses about a moved meeting. “I was really going to sell how harmless and boring I was.”

“Nobody’s ever going to buy that,” said Peter.

“Excuse you,” she said sharply.

“That you’re _boring,_ ” he said, quickly; Nightingale chuckled.

“You’re lucky you’re pretty,” Beverley said.

“Can you _not,”_ Abigail said; the tension was leaking out, she was going to have to do data entry all the rest of the day before the other fun stuff kicked in, and she wasn’t interested in listening to two of the others flirting.

“Quite, sorry, Abigail,” said Nightingale, which really didn’t make it better.

“How’s it going?” said a fourth voice, and Abigail nearly jumped out of her skin, or at least twitched violently, before she realised it was Lesley.

“On track,” Peter said. “Keeping an eye on Abigail?”

Abigail put her head round the side of the pitiful divider that was all the protection she got between her desk and the rest of the office; she could see Lesley on the far side of the room.

“Or I’ve got an eye on her,” she said.

“Let me know if anything goes wrong,” Lesley said, and disconnected. Abigail wondered why she bothered.

Abigail tuned out to focus on setting up the wipe program for the CCTV here, as well; no point having her face on camera footage, although this one was going to just re-direct the cameras to save their data to a hard drive that got wiped regularly. It was elegant, if she did say so herself, and looked like a dumb mistake by the IT department. Beverley was out, Nightingale was heading for the drop-off point, and there was nothing else for her to do right then.

“I’m going to go and grab lunch,” she said. “Alright?”

“Give it ten minutes,” said Peter, but Beverley made it to the drop-off in eight. “Alright, go, but keep your earpiece on.”

Since everything was going well, she went outside to let some of the sweat dry off in the spring breeze and picked up a kebab from a tiny shop two streets over nobody else from the firm would be likely to go near. She couldn’t help running through the rest of the plan as she walked back, eating as she went. She and Peter were going to grab the books from their temporary stash this evening while Beverley and Nightingale staged an obvious, crude, and completely fake break-in at the storage facility. In the confusion, it wouldn’t be clear where the books had gone, and –

Her train of thought broke off as she pushed open the lobby door to a completely unexpected sight: Tama, the tall and very friendly Samoan security guard who buzzed people in and looked after lost property, with the woman who’d called herself Awa Shambir carefully hemmed in. And Lesley, and one of the firm execs, not somebody whose name Abigail had bothered to remember. Not Lesley’s boss, one of the others, a David or a Matthew or a Charles or something like that. 

“– what this is about,” the woman was saying. No hijab today, or cleaning gear; she was in a good-quality navy business suit and heels. Abigail stood there with her mouth open and poised over the kebab for a full second before she remembered to close it. “I’m here for a business meeting.”

“You broke into this building last week,” said Lesley, her voice very hard, and Abigail remembered suddenly that she’d been a cop, like Peter. “The police have been called.” She turned, frowning. “Abigail!”

“I was getting lunch?” Abigail said. Probably-not-Awa-Shambir’s eyes on her were sharp; she felt a spike of worry. “What’s the matter?”

“Come here,” Lesley said, and the spike started to dig into Abigail’s guts.

“This is the accomplice?”said the manager.

“No, this is Grace,” said Tama. “Abigail was the temp before last. She’s not -”

He was looking at Lesley, not not-Awa-Shambir, so when the woman made a break for it he didn’t stand a chance at stopping her. Abigail hadn’t even had time to decide what she was going to do when the woman ran past and grabbed her by the arm, pulling her out of the building. She stumbled a step or two, heard shouts rising behind, and decided that this was the appropriate time to leg it.

 _Fuck, fuck,_ fuck, she thought, taking off after the other woman, not sure what she was going to do if she caught up, but sure she needed to do something. She could say she’d been chasing her – Lesley would cover for her, surely, this had to be part of a plan, she needed to get in touch with Peter –

“We’ve got a problem!” She panted into her earpiece as she rounded a corner into the dead-end lane she’d seen the woman turn down, just ahead. It wasn’t that she couldn’t move, it was that it was very difficult to keep up with someone whose legs were half again as long as yours, and in this part of the City there weren't even any convenient cobbles to slow her down in those heels.

“What are you doing?” hissed the woman. “Split up – they can’t chase both of us!”

“They’re not chasing me,” Abigail said.

“They thought we were working together,” said the woman. “I don’t know what you did, but –“ she looked at the fence at the end of the lane. It marked off private parking, accessible from a different street. Abigail had taken a few lunchtime walks around the area, just in case. “Oh, let’s call this my good deed for the day.”

Peter was talking in her ear, but Abigail didn’t have any attention for him. “What?”

The woman grabbed her by the waist and Abigail’s feet left the ground. At first she thought she was being picked up and struggled against it, but improbably, impossibly, they were three feet in the air and rising.

Abigail stopped struggling. “Shit!”

“Ow,” said the woman, probably because Abigail had got a decent kick in at her shins, but then they were up and over the fence and dropping – a little faster than Abigail would have liked – to the ground.

As soon as she was standing again Abigail staggered a step or two back, bumping into the hood of a car. She froze, but it didn’t set off an alarm.

“I think I burned it out,” the woman said, frowning over Abigail’s shoulder. “Eggs and omelettes. Alright, now we should split up. Just remember to walk, not run.” As she spoke she was stripping off her jacket and letting her hair down from its sleek bun; with the jacket over her arm she looked, not completely different, but like a lawyer popping out for lunch.

Abigail realised she was still holding her kebab, and wrapped the foil over the top of it. “Who are you, anyway?”

The woman laughed. “That’s your question?”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Alright.” She tilted her head. “Call me Louise.”

“What were you coming back for?”

“You’re really not going to ask about the flying?” Louise, if that was her name, looked put out. “Do you know how hard that is to pull off?”

“I know you’re a wizard,” said Abigail. “What I want to know is what you wanted there and why they were after you.”

“Maybe another time,” said Louise, and turned and walked – not ran – towards the pedestrian gate out of the parking area.

That was when Abigail realised Peter’s urgent voice in her ear was gone, and when she pulled her phone out of her pocket, it was dead. She glanced back at the car she hadn’t set off the alarm for, a shiny BMW.

“Burned it out, huh,” she said out loud, then shook her head. She had to get away, and let Peter and the others know she’d got away. She’d been gone too long to pretend she’d been chasing Louise. Lesley would just have to cover for her, if she could.

Time to start walking – not running – for the nearest Tube station.

*

Halfway to the warehouse where they’d stashed the books temporarily Abigail considered, with the sour taste of fear in her mouth, that she might be being followed. Then she realised that was stupid; if the police had been put onto her they’d just arrest her.

Also, she had absolutely no idea how to tell if somebody was following her, except for what she’d learned from watching thrillers, where it was always very obvious that the white guy in sunglasses and a suit was menacingly stalking the main characters. She really needed to learn stuff like that. She should ask Peter. He’d done organised crime for ages, he’d tailed lots of people, surely, and tried not to get followed himself. He’d know.

Meditating on the things she didn’t know kept her calm through the Tube ride. When she ran out of those, she switched to running through what she needed to burn on the Finlayson Amberley servers. All she needed was an Internet connection and ten minutes – she’d logged out of everything on her own machine before she’d gone to lunch, thank God – but right now she only had one of those. She pulled out her phone again, shook it, and scowled. It was making something like a rattling noise. She’d heard some rumours, but – what sort of bullshit was magic, anyway.

She came up around the back entrance to the warehouse. Beverley and Nightingale were there and they looked relieved to see her.

“You dropped out,” said Nightingale. “What happened?”

“Long story, but my cover’s probably blown at the firm unless Lesley is _really_ good at talking,” Abigail said. “That woman came back, the one who was pretending to be a cleaner, and – anyway, my phone’s toast, that’s what happened. Why are you here?”

“Lesley messaged,” said Beverley, waving her phone in Abigail’s direction. “Don't you have a spare phone?”

“Five, but none of them are on me,” said Abigail.

“Five?” Nightingale said, eyebrows rising.

“It’s my job – how many sets of lock picks has Beverley got?”

“One complete one,” said Beverley. “I swear my couch eats all my rakes.”

“Lesley told you what happened, then?”

“No,” said Nightingale. “Just to come here –”

He walked into the meeting room and froze. Beverley walked into his back and Abigail only just avoided banging into her; she took a step or two back.

“Get out,” Nightingale said, very level and very short. “Out. Go!”

Abigail took a breath to ask why, but Beverley had already spun around and was pushing her back down the corridor. “Go, go!”

She took to her heels for the second time that day, already wondering resentfully why she was getting manhandled so much. She nearly ran right into Peter as she came out the outside door. He was talking, she thought at first to himself but then she realised to his earpiece. “Slow down, why do I need to get away –”

“Go!” Nightingale yelled, and then the world went white and quiet.


	2. The Assembly Job

Abigail came back to her own head with her skin stinging all over and the world still eerily silent. For a moment she thought she was floating, and started to panic, but the rough surface of concrete under her back told her she wasn’t. Sensations started to filter back in; the damp swish of water all around her, a few faint noises – pinging and crackling – and a wash of heat off to her right.

She sat up, gasping, and rolled onto her knees. There was water, everywhere, ten or twenty centimetres deep across the width of the delivery bay. Beverley was on her knees, eyes closed and lips moving; maybe she was saying something, but sound was still having trouble making itself felt. Peter was sitting back, a scrape on his cheek, looking quickly from side to side.

Abigail got slowly to her feet and realized she couldn’t see Nightingale anywhere. Then that took second priority when the wash of heat turned out to be the warehouse. On fire.

She knew logically what had just happened but it wasn’t adding up on a gut level; this wasn’t the sort of con that brought assassination attempts into your life, and who even blew up buildings to kill people, surely shooting or stabbing or cutting brake lines was cheaper –

Beverley’s eyes opened, and Abigail tried wading over. “What happened?”

Beverley didn’t stand up; she looked perfectly comfortable in the cold water. She opened her mouth, but Abigail couldn’t hear anything that came out.

“I can’t hear you!” Abigail yelled, and tapped an ear. .

Beverley swore – that was easy enough to lip-read – and stood up. Something about the motion let Abigail’s eyes focus a few metres beyond her, where Peter was leaning over Nightingale. He wasn’t moving.

However the water had got there, it wasn’t draining away as fast as Abigail would have expected, and it made running difficult. So did the fact that all her muscles were checking in and reporting various degrees of system failure. She made herself move anyway.

Nightingale was sitting up by the time she got there, which made something unclench in her chest, but there was something funny about his right leg – Abigail had to look twice to realise that it was a piece of…something, glass or metal or debris, sticking up from his lower leg. Sticking _out_. She swallowed.

Sound was slowly leaking back in. The crackling and pinging was resolving into the dull roar of the warehouse fire and the slosh of water. Abigail still couldn’t make out anything anybody was saying, but she concentrated, and concentrated, and –

“–out of here,” Peter said, and then something that slipped away, and “got this.”

“–as bad as it looks,” said Nightingale through gritted teeth. There was a slow trickle of blood down the left side of his face.

“–lead,” said Beverley.

“You need a doctor,” Abigail said. “Like, _right now_. Call 999 now.”

Beverley and Peter exchanged a look Abigail had no idea how to interpret; at least Nightingale looked just as confused as she did.

“I’m taking care of it,” Peter said, slowly and loudly. “You need to go with Bev.”

“Do you even have a first aid certificate?”

“Hasn’t even expired yet,” said Peter. “Go.”

Abigail was getting tired of being told to go places, but her phone was dead and she’d basically just got blown up and it couldn’t possibly be much past two o’clock but it had already been a very, very, _very_ long day.

“Fine,” she said. Before they went, Beverley bent over and kissed Nightingale on the forehead, squeezing Peter’s shoulder for balance, or maybe comfort. Abigail hadn’t expected that.

“Come on,” Bev said, and led her round the side and two streets over to where the Thames was lapping high its banks.

Abigail was painfully aware of how soggy and bedraggled she looked, in her Grace Otieno clothes. Nobody had looked twice yet but soon somebody would, and then there would be questions. Some of the stinging was resolving into the definite feel of bleeding scrapes. “We better be finding a ride.”

“I’m the ride,” said Beverley. “If you trust me.”

 _What the hell_ , thought Abigail. “Uh. Sure?”

“Good. Jump in.”

“What?”

“Jump,” Beverley said, insistently, and Abigail knew if she hesitated she’d sit down and not move for an hour, so she swung herself painfully over the railing and into the river. It wasn’t pretty; she’d never been much of a swimmer. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Beverley execute a perfect dive, and then she was in the water, too dark with sediment to see anything, and then -

The next few minutes were extremely confusing, and for today, that was saying something.

*

They surfaced in a shallow pool that wasn’t _nearly_ deep enough to swim into, and yet here Abigail was; she broke the water gasping for air that suddenly seemed necessary again.

“Ow,” Beverley said, hitching one shoulder. “Been a while since I’ve taken anybody along. Serves me right for not bringing swimming gear.”

“That makes two of us.” Abigail examined the sad ruin of her clothes; it wasn’t like she’d been planning to use them again or anything, and she’d asked around some of her old school mates and found the right second-hand shops to get them from, but it brought distant echoes of the fuss her mum had made when she’d got clothes dirty as a kid, going places she wasn’t supposed to go. The fuss her mum would probably still make, since she’d been so pleased about Abigail having an office job. “Where – where are we?”

“My place,” said Beverley, wading towards the lawn that sloped to meet the river. “My river.” She turned, and frowned, supremely confident in her element. “You know -”

“Uh, yeah, you’re one of Mama Thames’ girls,” said Abigail. “I know.” She paused. “Does Peter…”

Beverley wrinkled her nose. “I might have been putting that off.”

“Good luck with that.”

Beverley just walked through the water; Abigail had to struggle against it, and she stepped on at least one stick, her office heels having got totally lost somewhere between Docklands and Putney. Beverley gave her a hand up onto the grass, and Abigail took it gratefully; she was stronger than she looked.

“Hello,” said someone who was not Beverley, in a strong Eastern European accent. Abigail startled, but luckily Beverley wasn’t looking.

“Hi, Maksim,” she said. “How’s the lawn going?”

“Getting done,” said Maksim, who was a white guy older than Abigail but not old, in a t-shirt that proclaimed him to be a member of the Beverley Brook Conservation Trust. “This is one of your sisters? I don’t think we’ve met.”

“One of Peter’s family,” said Beverley, and Abigail filed away the several implications of that statement for later, when her head wasn’t still ringing and blood wasn’t oozing from various scrapes and her lungs weren’t still trying to convince her she was drowning. “Come on, Abigail, let’s get inside and see where the others are at -”

“Is it safe here?” Abigail demanded. Maksim turned back from his mower at this, until Beverley motioned him away.

“It’s my place,” Beverley said again. “Safe as houses –– safer than anywhere but my mum’s, anyway. Come _on -_ ” She was walking faster and faster, not quite a jog. “I lost my phone. Fuck it.”

“Do you have internet? I mean, proper internet?” Abigail asked, actually jogging to keep up. Beverley led her through French doors into what was clearly a bedroom, scooped a towel up off the floor, and snagged another folded one off a pile by the door and tossed it at Abigail. Abigail toweled the worst of the water off, careless of the blood, and tried to ignore both the Keep Calm and Don’t Blink t-shirt she’d last seen _not_ on Beverley and the tie that Peter would definitely never wear.

“What do you think this is, darkest Herefordshire? Of course I have internet,” said Beverley, who was now scuffling through the layers of makeup and hair products on the dresser. She pulled out a three-year-old Samsung phone with a noise of triumph. “Hold on, I’m calling.”

“I need a computer and I need internet _right now_ or we are _very fucked,”_ Abigail said. “ _Now_.”

“Peter?” Beverley was saying.

Abigail hissed through her teeth with frustration and stalked right up to her. “ _Now_ now.”

“Right,” Beverley said, at first Abigail thought to the phone, but then she somehow produced a netbook from the pile on the dresser “The wifi password -”

“Don’t bother,” Abigail said, and sat down right there on the floor, dripping onto ambiguous mounds of clothing; Beverley could deal. She toweled off her hands again and balanced the laptop on the partially-dry towel, just to be sure. Beverley was talking, but definitely to the phone this time, and Abigail had work to do.

“Thomas isn’t dead yet, if you were wondering,” said Beverley at one point. She handed Abigail a scrunchie, so it was a forgiveable interruption.

“Great,” Abigail said, deep in a maze of VPNs and –rm -r commands that needed to be deployed with _extreme_ caution. She took one second to bunch her hair up, and had to wipe her hands off on the towel again. “Still busy.”

“Uh-huh,” said Beverley, and left her to it.

*

Abigail checked back in with the physical world an hour later, content that she’d done everything she could for the moment and left herself some room to play; all her accesses had still been operational, not that surprising when she’d swiped login details from half the company but a _smart_ IT team would have changed everybody’s passwords by now. She’d met their IT team; they weren’t half as smart as they thought they were.

Grace Otieno’s login was even still working, which said a lot. Not that Abigail was touching that with a bargepole now. It barely had access to the stuff she’d actually needed to do her alleged job, let alone what she needed to do her _real_ job. 

“Ugh,” she muttered, processing how clammy her clothes were, sticking to her skin, and the crusty feel of dried blood. “Okay. Beverley?”

There was no response; Abigail closed the laptop, brushed a sprinkling of what might be blush off the lid, and sought out the rest of the house. She found Beverley in the kitchen, which was _much_ tidier than the bedroom. Even the coffeemaker was clean. Abigail thought longingly of Red Bull, her not-very-secret vice on days like this, or days _approaching_ this, there’d never been a day quite like this, and started the coffeemaker instead.

“Make yourself at home.” Beverley sounded mostly amused.

“I’ve already bled on one of your towels, I think we’re past that.”

Beverley kissed her teeth. “I thought you weren’t hurt – nothing major?”

“Just scrapes, and my ears are still ringing.” Abigail bit her lip. “Is Nightingale OK?”

“For now.” Beverley looked at her curiously. “What was it you needed to get done right then?”

“I was wiping the CCTV, getting my fingerprints off the system. If they’re looking for me – you – any of us – there’s nothing to go on now. Somewhere like either of those offices, DNA will be a wash, so will fingerprints.”

“You’re thinking about the police.” Beverley grimaced. “That wasn’t the police.”

“I’m dealing with the problems I know how to deal with.” Abigail resisted the urge to wrap her arms around herself. “Who the hell wants to blow people up over some old books?”

“I think,” Beverley said, carefully, “that’s a conversation you need to have with Peter.” Her voice got drier. “That we all need to have, because I wasn’t expecting that, either, and I don’t think Thomas was, and he can be professionally paranoid when he wants.”

“Where _is_ Peter? I figured we were all meeting here, or something.”

“Not that I’m expecting anybody, except…anyway, just in case. We’ve got to head back into town. Peter’s taken Thomas to Molly’s.”

Abigail thought hard and drew a complete blank. “To where?”

“You don’t know Molly?” Beverley gave her a curious look. “I thought you might. She’s about as attached to technology as you are.”

“Then I guess we’ll have something to talk about.” Abigail tried three separate cupboards and gave up. “Mugs?”

“Under the sink. Pour me one too?”

“Sure.” At least sugar was easy to find, on the windowsill, in a very fancy porcelain container that was probably a gift from a grandmother or something; it didn’t seem like Beverley’s sort of thing. If Beverley had a grandmother. Abigail wasn’t entirely clear what the whole deal was with the Thames family. “You said you weren’t expecting anybody, except. What’s except.”

“Just my sisters.” Beverley wrinkled her nose, handing Abigail the milk. The expiry date was two days ago, but it smelled fine. The coffee was probably hot enough to kill anything dangerous; in it went, and into Beverley’s mug too when she nodded. “Ty _would_ be likely to show up just now, she has a nose for whenever one of us fucks up.”

“Give me two minutes to drink this, and we can go,” Abigail said hastily. She’d only heard about Lady Ty and had _no_ desire to make her acquaintance, at least not without warning. “You still haven’t really said who Molly is, either.” 

“She’s an old friend of Thomas’s grandfather,” said Beverley. “Long story – ask him.”

That was _not_ an answer Abigail had been expecting. “I’ll do that, too.”

*

After a hasty change of clothes, they piled into Beverley’s very shiny red Kia hatchback (“no, I don’t take it on jobs, I’m not an idiot”) and got stuck in traffic for an hour, which was the most bored Abigail had been since she’d left school. She’d remembered to snatch up the laptop before they left, but she didn’t have anything with mobile data and Beverley wouldn’t let Abigail use her phone (“no offence, but I don’t want it to develop artificial intelligence before we get where we’re going.”)

“I don’t think checking the BBC app to see if we’ve made the news is going to _increase_ its intelligence, but fine,” said Abigail.

“Peter’s been on the police channels, and their internals,” Beverley said. “Nothing about any of us. I mean, the warehouse exploding, yeah, but not the company or the books or any of that.”

“Really,” said Abigail. “That’s……weird.”

“If we did our part right they shouldn’t even know the books _are_ missing until tomorrow or the next day.”

“Shit.” Abigail had somehow forgotten – “They were at the warehouse!”

“Yeah,” said Beverley glumly. “I know.”

“Shit.” She slumped back in the car seat and glowered at innocent cyclists moving a lot faster than they were. Somehow, now the immediate adrenalin rush had faded, the idea that their take had been _destroyed_ was worse than just losing it. Anything lost could be stolen back. Blown up was…blown up.

Beverley pulled into a mews just off Russell Square. There was a generic dark-blue Ford Escort that looked suspiciously like the one Peter drove except for the plates, and a Jag – not a shiny new one but something old, maybe classic. Abigail was hazy on what counted for classic with cars. She didn’t drive, and it had never come up for a job. Besides, trains were way more interesting, and efficient, and environmentally-friendly.

“That’s Thomas’s,” Beverley said, noticing where she was looking. “We _really_ can’t take that out if we’re worried about being noticed. Peter’s life goal is getting to drive it.”

“Peter has really weird priorities,” said Abigail. “Wait, this isn’t flats – does this Molly person own a whole _house_? On _Russell Square_?” She’d pegged the Nightingale for real posh, not fake posh, but this was something else.

“It’s not really a house.” Beverley shivered hard as she opened the door, like she’d had a bucket of cold water dumped on her, but Abigail didn’t feel a breeze or anything.

The corridor behind the door was prosaic and lino-lined, but the doors leading off it had heavy wooden frames. They were immediately greeted, not by the mysterious Molly, but by a small, indignant dog. Abigail gave it the eye. It barked back, once or twice, but subsided when Beverley said “Down, Toby! Good boy. Take us to Peter, will you?”

It barked again, and sprinted off.

“Did it…understand you?” Abigail asked.

“Dunno,” said Beverley. “Hard to tell.”

They passed through an enormous atrium with an actual marble bust of Isaac Newton, of all people, at one end, above an empty display case. Nothing was dusty or dirty, but it had the echoing silence of disuse. Abigail contemplated property prices in this part of the city, and was duly amazed.

Nightingale and Peter were in a much smaller and – if only by comparison – cozier room. Beverley went straight to Peter and gave him a hug that he curled into for a vulnerable second before straightening. He still looked twitchy, so Abigail gave him an awkward pat hello on the shoulder. They’d never really done the hugging thing much even though they were cousins. Their mums had done enough of that for everybody.

There wasn’t anything sticking out of Nightingale’s leg anymore, Abigail noticed queasily, but he was looking pale even for somebody as white as he was, and there was blood on the bandage around his leg. He was sitting on a couch nobody had bothered to take the dust cover off, almost managing casual but his knuckles were white on the back of it.

“You should lie down,” Abigail told him.

“I’m quite alright,” he said, and Peter and Beverley rolled their eyes in _perfect_ stereo. It was kind of worrying.

“Have you even had that looked at?” Beverley asked.

Nightingale nodded.

“It’s fine,” Peter said, “Abdul’s been by. He had quite a few things to say.”

“I bet he did.” Beverley frowned. “How long are you going to be laid up for?”

“At least a week,” said Nightingale.

“At least two, for anything that involves running around,” said Peter. He looked Abigail up and down and seemed satisfied with her not-badly-injured-ness. “Everything alright?”

“Yes, but that’s really not what you should be worrying about,” she said. “You haven’t even asked if I managed to get back into their system -”

“Yeah, Bev said you went into a trance for about half an hour.” Peter shrugged. “I wasn’t worried. What do I _need_ to be worrying about?”

“I don’t suppose any of the information you’ve been gathering includes the motivation of whoever planted those explosives?” asked Nightingale.

“I was less gathering and more deleting,” said Abigail. Peter hauled a couple of dust covers off big overstuffed armchairs, so they could sit. He perched on the arm of the couch, which was the sort of thing that was only comfortable if you were his height. Beverley flopped down into an armchair. Abigail recapped what she’d done, in lay terms; everybody’s eyes stayed focused, good sign. “Basically I can get back in –– for now, probably long-term – and anything obvious is gone, but if they lock it down or go full forensics or whatever…they _should_ attribute the data loss to malware, but who knows. This is such a clusterfuck.”

“It would be less of one if I’d managed to contain the explosion properly.” Nightingale frowned, obviously at his own poor choices.

“How, exactly,” said Peter dryly, “were you planning to _contain_ an _explosion_?”

“Well, I got halfway there. Beverley handled the other half. You don’t think any of us would still be up and walking, otherwise?”

Peter shook his head, very slightly, like he was trying to process and failing. “What?”

“He’s a wizard, Peter,” Abigail sighed. “I was gonna ask if you knew. I should have asked.”

Peter looked from Nightingale, to Beverley – who just shrugged – and back. “That…explains a lot and absolutely nothing.”

“How does it explain _nothing_?”

“Because wizards are fictional,” Peter said, patiently. “Except…fuck, we’ll talk about this later. That’s not even the most important thing.”

“Also, your girlfriend is the goddess of Beverley Brook,” Abigail said, because you couldn’t talk about some things later. “And sometimes I talk to foxes.”

Peter gave her a long, very intent look; she eyed him right back. Nightingale took in a short breath like he meant to say something, but apparently thought better of it.

“Yeah, we _can_ actually talk about this later,” Beverley said, folding her arms. “Can we get back to the explosion?”

“Can Abigail at least explain the foxes?”

“They’re very smart and some of them can talk,” Abigail said. “I dunno how, because they totally don’t have the physiology for it, but they do.”

Peter was starting to get that stubborn set to his jaw that meant his investigative instincts had come to the fore, but now she’d got those things off her chest – and confirmed that Peter _was_ somehow an oblivious idiot _and_ capable of organizing a decent con – Abigail was willing to move on for the moment.

“It wasn’t a very subtle trap,” Nightingale said, evidently versed in the art of redirecting Peter’s attention. “C4 and timers; not even well-hidden. Which means -”

“Either someone wasn’t planning for anybody to get killed, or they had a really good idea of where we were going to be and when,” said Peter. “But they can’t have, because none of us would have been there if Abigail hadn’t got caught - but Lesley was…” he trailed off.

“ _I_ didn’t get caught!” Abigail retorted, pride touched by that. “It was that Louise woman or whatever her name really is – wait, I didn’t even get to say, _she’s_ a wizard too -”

“That’s not a surprise, we knew that,” said Beverley. “Louise, is it?”

“Bloody hell,” said Peter, standing up and tapping his fist on the back of the couch. “Okay. Okay. We need a timeline -”

They found a small blackboard in another room that had clearly once been a library, the kind on wheels. Abigail wondered if this building had belonged to a university, but she couldn’t think of which one it would be, or maybe some sort of society. It was the only thing that maybe made sense. The mysterious Molly finally poked her head in – heralded by Toby, who Nightingale seemed to be fond of, Abigail had definitely had him down as a dog person. Molly had long black hair and wore a dark coloured skirt and pastel pink blouse that looked like it had come off the set of one of those live-like-people-who-had-to-carry-their-own-hot-water-upstairs shows Abigail’s mum loved.

“Hi,” said Abigail. Molly stared at her.

“Molly!” Beverley said enthusiastically, and got a smile; it had about twenty teeth too many. “She’s not much of a talker, Abigail, it’s not you.”

Molly arched an eyebrow in a way that suggested that hadn’t been decided yet, but she gave Abigail a nod, at least. A completely one-sided conversation ensued between her, Beverley, and Nightingale that concluded in all of them being obliged to stay for dinner. Peter said hi, but mostly he was busy writing things on the blackboard, rubbing them out, and writing them down again somewhere else. He’d acquired a fine layer of chalk dust that highlighted every errant curl on his head. He was totally overdue for a haircut.

Abigail waited until Molly was out of the room before asking “How do you even know what she means?”

“You figure it out,” said Beverley. “Anyway, she likes cooking, she was always going to make us stay and eat.”

“Here’s the thing,” said Peter, finally dusting off his hands. “We know what we were after. We _got_ what we were after. But who else knew, and when did they know it?” He scratched the back of his head; it didn’t help the chalk situation. “You know, I’ve done this a lot, but I’ve never done it this way around. I know exactly how the crime was committed and I have no idea what the investigative team knows – if there even is an investigative team. Nothing’s popped up on HOLMES yet.”

“I need to get to a computer again and check some more things,” said Abigail. “But, yeah, no evidence anybody’s noticed the books missing yet.”

Nightingale shifted his weight, with a wince; he probably shouldn’t even be here. “Or their presumed destruction?”

“Or that.” Abigail hesitated. “Do we have to call it, you know, the crime?”

“Don’t make me quote statues,” said Peter. “Or prospective charges. Mind you, those are pretty flexible depending on what they can prove.”

“It’s a job,” said Abigail. “It’s just – it’s a job. You don’t have to go on about it.”

“That’s a losing battle,” said Beverley. “Who knew? Here’s the obvious question – where’s Lesley?”

Peter was silent for a moment. “Yeah. That is the question. She hasn’t called in. I haven’t tried to get in touch again yet.”

“You were on the phone to her, at the warehouse,” said Nightingale.

“She was trying to get me away from there.”

“That’s just a bit suspicious.” Beverley’s voice was light, but the hand by her side was, for just a second, a fist. “You know what’s more suspicious?

“I think it’s _very_ suspicious, but if there’s something more than that –”

“She messaged and told us to go there. That’s why we were there at all – we were supposed to stay away for the rest of the day, remember?”

“Fuck,” Peter said, succinctly. “You couldn’t have lead with that?”

“I was hoping there was another explanation!”

“But that’d just be dumb,” Abigail broke in. “You weren’t snapchatting, the messages are still going to be there on the server! Even if she deletes them on her end.”

Everybody looked at her, and she realised that probably wasn’t the first thing on their minds. “Also, she didn’t seem…I don’t know…murderous.”

“They rarely do,” Nightingale said on top of Peter saying “Yeah, mostly they don’t.” They exchanged an amused glance, but Peter’s smile tapered off into stillness very quickly.

“She came to you with the job, too,” Beverley said, voice still flat. “Her boss’s books, right? A chance to get back at him for –”

Abigail shook her head. “But if it was a set-up, why let us go through with it –”

“Story was,” Peter said, “they were accessible because he was selling them on the down-low out of spite; his wife’s divorcing him from Australia, got their only kid to transfer to university there. It was a way to get cash that didn’t officially belong to him, and get it back from the company after the divorce went through.”

“I thought he didn’t know what he had,” added Nightingale, “but given all this…maybe he did.”

“You were very interested in the titles.” Peter gave him a sharp look. “Want to elaborate on that?”

“Some of them were just old. Some of them were about, er. More esoteric things.”

“This wizard thing.”

“Yes. It would be…a complication.”

“Jesus _Christ.”_ Peter actually did a full facepalm. “You could have mentioned you had an actual interest in the books -”

“Was this even _about_ the books?” Abigail was getting a sick feeling she’d missed something, and she hated doing that, she couldn’t _afford_ to do that, but it had been Peter and she’d trusted him –

“Not exactly.” Peter grimaced. “I mean – we _were_ actually stealing them, but –”

“You were _lying_ to me.” Abigail shot to her feet. “And _your_ friend just set us up to get killed – or them to get killed and me to get arrested, it doesn’t matter – and you didn’t even tell me what you were really doing.“ She didn’t even know what to say next; she was choking on the words. So she left.

She half-expected Peter to come after her, or maybe Beverley, but she made it most of the way towards the rear door she’d entered by and there was no sign. She almost walked out, but then she thought about the way the world hadn’t sounded after the –– after the bomb had gone off, and the way her elbows and knees were still stinging, and blood on Nightingale’s face, and who knew what was waiting outside that door.

She turned around, and Molly was standing right behind her. Abigail outright shrieked.

Molly just raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, yeah, well done,” Abigail said. “Look. Beverley said – do you have, like, Internet? Wifi? I need to – I need to do some things.”

Molly tilted her head, and then nodded.

“And if you have an old phone, that’d be super-handy,” said Abigail. “Like, a smartphone, not a telephone.”

Molly smirked, and Abigail had the distinct impression that if she hadn’t clarified she might have been presented with an old rotary phone or something like that. Everything else in this place looked old enough.

She gestured towards the door, and Abigail followed her out. She needed to – she needed to think.

And, shit, to call her mum. She’d totally said she'd be home by six.

*

She holed up in a big long room with dirty windows and a mysterious dust-covered stack at one end, above the garage. At the other it had a small working area with a desk and a desktop set up. Molly presented her with a third-gen iPhone, which wasn’t Abigail’s favored device by a long shot but you took what you could get. Abigail still had Beverley’s laptop but she hadn’t grabbed the charger, so instead she logged on to Molly’s machine, studiously avoiding the urge to poke around the C drive,  and started setting some things up.

Contrary to what she’d said earlier, she realised that if Beverley and Nightingale’s burner phones were both broken – as they seemed to be –– there really wasn’t any way to find the message Lesley had allegedly sent them. Which was the whole point of using an end-to-end secure app, but maybe then – no, she didn’t think Beverley had been lying. One person had saved her life today and one person had tried to get her arrested, and she knew which one made her more likely to trust someone.

But she _could_ still try something else. She added herself to the group, and sent a message directly to Lesley.

_Hey this is Abigail my phone got busted what was going on? Why did you tell that guy I was an accomplice?_

She wasn’t really expecting a reply, but she was only three minutes into setting up her access permissions when the phone went.

 _Sorry a bit of a misunderstanding_  
it would have been cleared up it’s gonna be hard since you ran away  
we need to talk  
Abigail took a breath, and another, before she typed.

_Yeah we do I haven’t heard anything from anybody not even Peter and the news says there was a fire at the warehouse_

_I'm really worried but it’s better if I lay low_

Shorter gap this time.

 _We definitely need to talk_. _When can u meet_

Abigail stared at the phone while the computer worked, thinking about all the things it didn’t say, like _I was talking to Peter_ or _the last I heard from the others was before the fire_ or even _what happened to the books._

 _Tomorrow,_ she sent finally. _Tell me where and when._

*

Half an hour later, there was a knock on the door.

“Yeah?”

“Can we have a chat?” Peter said, without opening it.

“Are you going to tell me what’s really happening?”

He hesitated, but then he said “Yeah,” so Abigail opened the door. He’d never lied to her directly.

“If it wasn’t about books,” she said as soon as she could see him, “it was about getting in there. You had me wire up their systems pretty good but I didn’t touch any of the financial stuff, you’re not interested in their consulting business. So what was it?”

“It was about data,” Peter said. “Which I probably should have told you. You want me to come in here, or –”

“I’m still working,” Abigail said. “Come in.”

“Peace offering,” he said, and held out a plate of biscuits. “I’d have brought a beer but Molly doesn’t really drink it.”

Abigail realized exactly how long it had been since that kebab she’d never finished eating.

“Yeah, okay,” she said. “I’m going to eat these and you’re going to talk.”

*

Before he’d left the police – had to leave – Peter had been in Organised Crime; Abigail knew that, and she knew that that was, somehow, how he knew Beverley and the Nightingale.

“But the thing that started this wasn’t anything to do with them,” he said. “It was actually something that got bounced over from the Serious Fraud Office when a couple of bodies showed up. We never identified them, so that part didn’t go far, but the rest of it…”

According to Peter, the case he’d been working on involved targeting immigrants for cheap labour.

“A whole lot of people,” he said. “A lot of the stuff they were employing them for – well, employing is too strong a word probably – making them do was more or less legal. The conditions weren’t, the pay wasn’t, but the work was. But some of it……wasn’t, and they were going after people who’d had visas expire, or whose paperwork was half-done, or they’d gone through dodgy agents, or…you know the kind of thing. And it’s got so much worse for them recently. Fuck – it’s bad enough even if you are a citizen, if you’re the wrong kind of citizen.”

Abigail nodded; she knew, not for her dad or mum but other people on the estate. “That doesn’t sound like organised crime, though.”

“Some of the not-legal work? That was.” Abigail was pretty sure Peter was talking about sex trafficking and didn’t want to say it to her, because she was his baby cousin, which was silly but whatever. “But yeah, mostly nobody was that interested and it was hard because if we looked really closely…a lot of people were going to end up getting deported, and that might not be worse, but sometimes it would, and –– it was a mess, okay? And what was definitely illegal was that they were using government data to find people. Technically they have contracts to do big data mining and identify overstayers and that sort of thing but they weren’t passing everything on. And what was definitely not on was that the ones who were partway with visas, they were offering to make it right, and taking in their documents, and then not giving them back. So if they tried to get help, they’d be done as overstayers and deported. I wanted to prove it, but like you said, it wasn’t close enough to what we were supposed to be doing and it got further and further down the priority action list and then –”

“Then you got kicked out,” said Abigail. “I thought you were going to say it was a drugs thing, because I know –”

“Technically that’s not even on the paperwork,” Peter said, very flat, looking over her shoulder at something that wasn’t there. “Because there wasn’t any good evidence, because I didn’t……”

“Then why did you let them push you out?” Abigail had wondered that for ages now; Peter was stubborn and smart and knew how things worked, how _systems_ worked, and he’d let his bosses make him quit.

Peter took in a deep breath. “Because it was made clear to me that it looked just bad enough I wasn’t going to get the benefit of the doubt. Not from my boss, or her boss. They knew it was bullshit. But the chain goes a lot higher up than a DI or a DCI. And that’s all the talking we’re going to do about that.”

‘Looked just bad enough’, Abigail knew, was because of Uncle Richard. It seemed so grossly unfair, the way Peter put it, that there was a bitter taste on her tongue, but honestly it was a surprise Peter had said this much. He hated talking about any of it. That was what Aunt Mamusu had said to her dad. He certainly never had to her before.

“So this was a set-up to get the proof you couldn’t get before.” Abigail folded her arms, and glared. “You could have _told_ me –”

“At first I didn’t know it was going to _be_ you. And then I thought –”

“If the next words out of your mouth are ‘I should keep you safe’ when you were hiring me to break about a million laws –” Abigail unfolded her arms again to do the full air-quotes.

“You weren’t supposed to have to go undercover! It was keeping _everybody_ safer.”

“Well now you have no proof and no books and someone’s tried to kill us, so how good an idea was that?”

“Granted,” Peter said. “The books were – good for a lot of reasons. When Lesley brought it up as a joke I thought…their provenance is dodgy as fuck to start with, Winstanley and Postmartin confirmed that, and it was going to pay for the whole thing, and once he got a look at the list Thomas was really interested even if he never really said why. I thought it might be because one or two of them were in Latin. He’s a bit of a nerd about languages. But apparently not.”

“Like you have any room to call people nerdy,” said Abigail, who had absolutely no room to dodge herself on that score. “I think they’re probably wizard books though.”

Peter frowned at her. “Are you _totally_ sure about that?”

“Aren’t you more worried about the river goddess thing?”

“I’m trying to worry about the vaguely plausible things you said.”

“Ask Beverley how we got back to her place.”

“She said you swam. It sounded like a joke.”

“She swam. I was just sort of along for the ride.”

Peter was giving her a very serious look of confusion now, which was his problem; Beverley was his girlfriend. Probably. Abigail wasn’t a hundred percent sure what was going on there.

“Anyway, never mind that,” Abigail went on. “What are we going to do now?”

“I think we’re going to have dinner,” Peter said. “And then we’re going to talk about what we do next.”

Abigail hesitated. “So that’s not going to be, like, keeping our heads down and staying away from all of this?”

“It can be for you, if you want.”

“Fuck, no.”

“Well, then.” Peter grinned at her. “No, it’s going to be a bit the opposite of that.”

“Okay,” Abigail said. “Cool. What’s for dinner?”

*

“It’s insurance fraud,” Abigail said, the next morning. “It’s totally insurance fraud.”

“It definitely is,” Peter agreed, scrolling back up to the top of the theft report that had been filed for the missing books. Which were certainly missing – Beverley had gone back and checked the warehouse – but equally certainly not blown up.

“Run that past me again,” said Nightingale.

“So Chorley transferred ownership of the books to the company. Or to a trust, technically – basically to the company,” Peter said. “Nobody’s going to have much luck proving _how_ they were nicked, but they’re gone from the storage facility, and I guarantee that now he’s got them sitting somewhere and he’s going to get the cash as well. Or the company is, and then he will.”

“Won’t the insurance company be going after the firm first, though?” Beverley asked. “They get suss about big enough amounts. And Chorley’s guilty, even – he organised for them to be stolen.”

“He – right.” Peter made a face. “He did. Assuming……”

“Lesley answered any of your texts yet?”

“No,” Peter said, quietly. “Shit.”

Abigail almost opened her mouth, but something held her back. Peter had lied to her, he hadn’t told her things, and maybe if he hadn’t – this was something she needed to do for herself, that was all.

“Okay,” she said instead. “So what are we going to do, then?”

“Some recon,” Peter said. “First thing I want to do is find out what that woman – Louise, you said – was doing there, what she was after.”

“There’s a market on Thursday,” said Nightingale. “That’s probably your best chance of running into her.”

“What kind of market? Flea market, food market, TVs that fell off the back of lorries –”

“A goblin market,” said Beverley. “For people, and…people.”

“I’ve heard about those,” Abigail said. “Never been. Look, if that’s our next target, I have some stuff I have to do this afternoon.”

“Okay,” Peter said. “Can you get started on database searches for her, too?”

“You know how to do that just as well as I do.”

“But if the connection goes down, I’d have to get you to restart it,” Peter said. Abigail rolled her eyes. “Fine, yeah, I’ll do that too.”

“Maybe none of us should go anywhere alone,” said Nightingale, grimacing as he shifted in his chair. He wasn’t going to be going anywhere for a little while.

“There’s no search out for us,” Abigail said. “It’ll be fine.”

*

She nearly chickened out half-a-dozen times on the way to the café where she was supposed to meet Lesley, every time the train doors opened. Maybe she should let Peter handle this. But – it wasn’t that she trusted Lesley: completely the opposite. It was more that she knew Peter _had_ trusted her, and she wanted to get her own take on it. Lesley hadn’t tried to get her blown up, after all. She couldn’t turn her in without risking herself, either. It was worth a talk, and then she could go back and let the others know what she’d found out.

“Hi,” said Beverley from behind her as she swiped through the gate to get out of the station.

“Gah!” Abigail nearly missed the light going green, and stumbled through. “What -”

“Nobody’s going anywhere alone,” said Beverley, swiping herself through as well; Abigail had half-expected her to slip through somehow without. “Unless it’s something _very_ private.”

“How did you even get here before me?”

“Professional secret.” Beverley grinned. “Tell you later.” Her face straightened. “You want to tell me what this is about?”

Abigail had got through a week and a half at Finlayson Amberley and lied straight-faced about all sorts of things to all sorts of people, but Beverley looked _worried_ , which was playing dirty.

“No,” she said. “Okay. I’m sort of meeting Lesley.”

It was almost worth it for the expression that got her. “You _what_?”

“I wanted to see what she had to say to me. Not to Peter. Because obviously he trusts her and I – don’t.”

“I’d like to be able to trust her,” Beverley said frankly. “One less thing to worry about.” She sighed. “How about I tag along out of sight?”

“Does she know what you look like?”

“Only sort of. And I know how to follow someone.”

“Nightingale teach you that?”

“That and lots of watching Peter try to follow us,” Beverley said. “Where are we going, then?”

She was supposed to meet Lesley in the Costa Coffee up the road, but she was still fifty metres away when Beverley grabbed her arm and dragged her back around a corner.

“That guy, there,” she said in Abigail’s ear. “He’s watching the entrance.”

“Shit.” Abigail got out her phone and managed to snap a shot or two through the hurrying crowds.

“You could still go in.”

Abigail remembered Lesley’s face in the lobby. “I think that might be a bad idea.”

“Of course it’s a bad idea, that doesn’t mean you can’t do it.” Abigail shot a glance at Beverley; Beverley shrugged. “Where would we be if we all only did our good ideas?”

“Probably less worried about getting blown up?”

“Nah,” Beverley said. “I don’t reckon.”

Abigail looked at the guy watching the entrance; he seemed to be reading a newspaper, but he was glancing up every time someone entered the café. Maybe he was waiting for someone. Maybe.

“Never mind,” she said. “I think this is its own answer.”

 _Sorry,_ she texted Lesley. _Can’t make it. Probably best we all lay low anyway._

*

Abigail didn’t know exactly what she was expecting from a goblin market. She’d met too many people tied up with magic to expect it to be really out there, like something from the set of a Guillermo del Toro movie, or even Harry Potter,  but on the other hand talking foxes were a thing. So maybe a goblin market might have a goblin or two. She hadn’t been sure.

Turned out it was basically just people. Even the ratio of dyed hair and piercings wasn’t any higher than you’d get at Camden Lock. Abigail didn’t know if she was disappointed or not. Looking around, she couldn’t spot Dan or any of his friends and family, either, not even lurking around the bins. The only person she saw that she did know was someone she went to school with, which would be weird except she thought she remembered that Lily’s mum was Beverley’s sister Fleet – not that she’d known that at school but she knew it now – so it wasn’t so weird, after all.

Peter wasn’t bothering to pretend he wasn’t mentally cataloging everything and everyone he saw. Maybe you wouldn’t spot it if you didn’t know Peter, but – no, a couple of the stall holders were looking twitchy.

“Stop that,” Abigail said. “You’re looking at this place like you’re trying to figure out who to arrest.”

“I am not,” said Peter. “For one thing: not my job anymore.”

“I should have come here with Beverley or Thomas,” Abigail groused.

“So do I, but they both said that was a bad idea.” Peter glanced down at her. “For reasons they didn’t elaborate on. You want to do better?”

“They’re just, you know,” Abigail said, sticking her hands in her jeans pockets. “Themselves. Being here with you doesn’t say anything about me. Being here with one of them would.”

“Mmm.” Peter didn’t sound very convinced by this.

“Have you actually talked to them?” Abigail asked, pointedly. “About whatever it is you’re trying to get me to tell you? Because I pretty much told you what I know.”

“Is that really your business?”

“Ugh. Fine.”

“Speaking of,” said Peter, “has my ex-colleague tried to get in touch with you again?”

“Not more than what I already told you.” It was the truth, even. “I’ve still got that SIM card but I’m not texting back. We agreed.” Then, in the best bit of luck she’d had this week, their target came into view. “Don’t look – Louise is by that stall on your two o’clock, the one with all the weird masks. Alright. She’s looking away, you can look.”

Peter didn’t even appear to look in that direction; okay, perhaps he was a tiny bit better at this sort of thing than Abigail had given him credit for. “Nice boots and a designer silk blouse?”

“Um, definitely the boots.” Abigail wasn’t sure how you identified a silk blouse at twenty meters and was frowning at a food truck selling kebabs –– she wasn’t even sure how they’d got it into a disused Tube station – so she didn’t stare, so she couldn’t check again. “Let me go up to her, okay, and then –”

“Way too late,” Peter said, and Abigail looked around to see Louise walking briskly towards them. The crowd wasn’t exactly parting for her, but at her height it didn’t matter; you could see her coming all the same.

“Uh,” said Abigail.

“I wasn’t really expecting to see you here,” said Louise, sounding friendly enough. “You made it away okay the other day? This the boyfriend?”

“Basically,” said Abigail. “And ew. No.”

“Good, he’s way too old for you.”

“Hi,” said Peter. “I’m Peter. Any chance we can have a chat?”

“Maybe.” Louise looked at both of them curiously. “Depends on what brings you here.”

“Bev mentioned it to me,” said Peter, brazen as you liked. “Beverley Brook.”

“Huh,” said Louise, now sounding more worried.

“And also,” said Abigail, “’basically’ means that somebody tried to kill me a bit after the last time I saw you. We should definitely talk about that.”

“What?!” Louise didn’t just looked surprised; she had the scrunched-up expression people got when they tried to deny the reality of something. “If you’re thinking it was me –”

“We’re really not,” said Peter. “More like, somebody might have tried to come after you, too.”

“Fuck!” She folded her arms, and frowned. “Fine, we can chat – but you’re buying the drinks.”

“I think that can be managed,” said Peter. “Any recommendations around here?”

*

“I really don’t know why I'm not heading for a few weeks on the French Riviera right now,” said Louise frankly, sipping her gin and tonic. Abigail still hadn’t really learned to like beer but wasn’t sure what else it would be right to get, so she was playing with her pint and hoping neither Peter or Louise noticed it wasn’t being drunk. “Someone tried to blow you up – Jesus. I thought I was looking into…I didn’t think it was anything like that.”

“I wondered if you were a journalist, from what Abigail told me,” said Peter. “But you’re not.”

“I-“ Louise looked put out. “That would have been a great cover story if I’d thought of it first.” She tilted her head. “You two, you’re definitely not journalists. Some branch of the Thames family? There’s absolutely loads of them.”

“Nah,” Peter said. “Think of us as concerned citizens.”

“Think of me as one too.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Abigail. “A job’s a job.”

“What job would that be, exactly?”

“We asked first,” said Peter. “Why did you run into Abigail and why did you get caught?”

Louise took a deep breath. “Look. There’s…someone I know, she taught me…some stuff…”

“Like, magic?” Abigail perked up a bit at this; nobody she’d ever met had really talked about _how_ wizards knew magic. All she really knew was that Bev and her sisters was something else altogether.

“Yeah,” said Louise. “She’s been doing something with……that place we met at…and I think she’s in over her head. I wanted to find out how much.”

“You should have hired a private detective,” Peter said. “Better odds.”

“I wouldn’t know where to find one. And I’m good at that sort of thing, normally.” She grinned. “Change of clothes, keep your head down – people see what they want to see.”

“You got caught,” Peter pointed out.

“Let’s be fair,” said Abigail. “That was me. Sort of.” She added hastily, seeing Louise tense, “You can’t blame us – we didn’t know what you were doing or why you were there.”

“I think I _can_ blame you,” Louise said. “So convince me why I shouldn’t. What were you doing there? Since it was obviously just about as sneaky as I was trying to be.”

“You said somebody you know is involved,” said Peter. “Investments, I’m guessing? Well, you should be worried – that place runs on blackmail and about half a dozen forms of financial fraud, although maybe only two or three they might ever get charged on. The rest is just consultancy bullshit.”

Louise’s eyes narrowed. “Are you sure you’re not the police?”

“I’m very sure.” Peter’s voice was a bit too level, but probably you’d only notice that if you knew him. “And if you’re going to ask, why don’t you go to the police…why don’t you?”

“M- my friend,” said Louise. “I’m more worried about her than about legalities. I thought if I could find out, I didn’t know, something, I could persuade her…shit, I don’t know. Blackmail sounds nasty.”

“We can probably add a bunch of other things at a remove,” Peter said. “Violation of labour laws, kidnapping –”

“Okay, that’s enough!” She held up a hand. “Have you got any proof?”

“Not right now,” Peter said, even though it occurred to Abigail that he had to have something or he wouldn’t have started this in the first place. “Want to help us get some?”

Louise’s eyebrows shot up. “What makes you think I’d be any help?”

“You’re good at pretending to be people you’re not,” said Peter. “With the whole cleaner thing, Abigail told me about it – you got a couple of things wrong but nothing obvious. It’s a skill we’re a bit short on right now.”

“You’re pretty good at it,” Abigail pointed out to him.

“You know why that won’t work,” said Peter.

Louise’s shoulders had tensed, but they relaxed when Abigail spoke; what was that about, anyway?

“That’s it?” She said. “We’re going to go in and get this proof of yours?”

“We’re also going to steal some books,” said Peter. “If that’s okay with you.”

“What, _again_?” said Abigail. “But aren’t they going to be –”

“Oh, yeah, it’s going to be a lot harder.” Peter nodded towards Louise. “That’s why we need someone extra.”

“Sure,” Louise said, finishing her drink. “If I’m going to do this, why not?”

“Welcome to the team,” said Peter, and they shook hands.

Abigail realised she totally didn’t even know if Louise was the woman’s real name.

*

It took five hours of research and an exploit she’d technically been saving for a rainy day – not to get into the driver licence database, that was easy enough, but crowbaring it into the database of a facial recognition algorithm took a little longer. It was the most depressing part of hacking because technically she had access to everything on this computer, it was just that the people who’d made the software hadn’t intended it to be used that way. They’d intended people to have to pay them a lot of money to use it that way.

While she was thinking about it, she went back and installed Photoshop on Molly’s computer, because Molly had let her set up a couple of boxes in the room above the garage and that was what you did for friends. Nightingale apparently wasn’t allowed to leave the house for a week –– he was surprisingly quick on crutches but not that quick – so they were all sort of hanging around…whatever this place was. Nobody had explained to Abigail how Molly had an entire building on Russell Square, Molly wasn’t talking, and the property records hadn’t been any help either.

“Hi,” said Beverley. “Are you –”

“I found her,” Abigail said, very pleased with herself and wanting to share the news. “Caroline Elizabeth Louise Linden-Limmer.”

“That’s a lot of name.” Beverley came in and shut the door behind her. “Yeah – that’s her alright.”

“She’s a lady. Her mum’s a viscountess.” Abigail brought up a Wikipedia page. It was amazing what people just put on the Internet, although to be fair some of those photos were definitely taken before the Internet had been a thing. “And never mind the racy pics, these ones are far more interesting.”

There was more than one picture of Lady Helena Linden-Limmer caught on the edges of a social function for Finlayson Amberley. “She said she had a friend who was investing in the company. I think it’s her mum.” Then something clicked. “Hey, hang on – how did you know this was her?”

“Well, you did show me the photos,” said Beverley, “but she’s downstairs right now.” She looked thoughtfully at the screen. “Her mum. That explains a lot.”

“Like why nobody sent her photo to the police?”

“Yeah, except that probably doesn’t say good things about her mum’s involvement.”

“Or the police couldn’t identify her,” Abigail pointed out.

“You’re good,” Beverley said, “but it’s a numbers game really and there’s, like, ten thousand of them. They usually get there in the end.”

“That’s just what Peter would say.” Abigail stood up and tapped the keys to lock her session. “What do you think? I mean, Peter decided to get her involved.”

“I think it’s fine as long as we remember what she wants,” said Beverley. “He didn’t just decide then, you know.”

“Well he didn’t talk about it to me.”

“You were going along – you could have said something then and there.”

“I can’t do stuff if I don’t know what’s happening,” Abigail said. “Do any of you really understand that?”

“Yes,” Beverley said. “So let’s find out why she’s here.”

*

They gathered in what had clearly, once upon a time, been some sort of lecture theatre. Abigail looked automatically for a projector and realized this place was so old all it had was  old-fashioned slides, not even an overhead projector like she just remembered from primary school. The powerpoints in the wall looked very dodgy, too. Abigail wasn’t any sort of electrician really but if you spent enough time mucking with computers you learned some things, and of course with her dad working on the Tube she had a very healthy respect for all the ways you could electrocute yourself.

“Nobody’s really used this place since the Second World War,” said Nightingale, catching her frowning at the sockets. “I’m afraid you won’t find much technology here.”

“The reception is awful, too,” Abigail said, pulling out her phone. “Bet there’s metal all through the walls. What was this place, anyway?”

“It was, so I’m told,” he said, “the heart of official British magic.”

“And then what happened?”

He shrugged. “The Second World War. There weren’t a lot of survivors. My grandfather John came back missing half a leg and any desire to talk about what happened, although that’s nothing to do with magic in and of itself.”

“And Molly was friends with your grandfather?”

“Since they were both young, I understand.”

Abigail looked over at Molly, who was helping Peter replace a lightbulb - the reason for the hold-up - and then back at Nightingale. “You can’t tell me she’s been around since World War II.”

“Since before it. She certainly hasn’t changed much since I was young.”

Nightingale said all this with utter sincerity, and it wasn’t that Abigail didn’t think he could lie, it was that she couldn’t think of a reason he _would.”_

 _“_ I have to say,” Louise-or-maybe-Caroline said, walking in with Beverley, “based on everything I heard about the Folly, I was expecting something grander than this.”

“It’s a lovely old Georgian building,” Peter said severely - he had architectural opinions - “it’s just a bit empty.”

Molly gave Caroline a very dirty look.

“I suppose that’s it,” Caroline said diplomatically, one eye on Molly, who stared at her a moment longer before sweeping out.

“Right, now that’s done,” Peter said, drawing them into a circle close to the blackboard at the pit of the theatre. “The PowerPoint presentation is going to have to wait until Abigail gets onto the set-up. For the moment, we have two problems. The first one is, we still need those books back. The second one is, we need their data. What I’m hoping is that we can keep the attention focused on the first thing and not the second.”

“If he’s expecting us to steal the books, it’s going to be that much harder,” said Beverley.

“He already is,” said Abigail. “I thought about where I’d put them if I didn’t want anybody to steal them and then I hacked into their records, and…”

“If it’s the Tower then I’m afraid we might have to throw in the towel,” said Nightingale. “There are some things that require a somewhat larger team than we have available. Or an actual military unit.”

“Where’s your sense of imagination?” Caroline asked. “I could talk my way in there.”

“In, certainly,” he said, “but with that sort of thing it’s out that tends to be the kicker.”

“They’re not in the Tower!” Abigail said with some exasperation. “They’re in a warehouse.”

“In another warehouse?” Beverley made a face. “That doesn’t sound like much of a challenge.”

“A warehouse owned by Sotheby’s,” said Peter. “I’m not sure yet if the plan is actually to sell some of them off through a third party, now he’s getting the insurance payout, or whether he just called in a favour, but they have some of the most valuable individual items in the world going through there. It might be slightly easier if it was the Tower.”

“If he thinks it’s impossible then it’s not much of a distraction,” Beverley said.

“We already got them once,” said Peter. “So he’s got to be aware of the possibility. What he doesn’t know is whether we’re all alive. The trick is going to be keeping his attention on that, and not anything else.”

“Big. Flashy. Undeniable,” Caroline said, leaning back in her chair. “You know, when I was a teenager I thought I might go and do a PhD in art history. Not the European Renaissance or something boring like that – African art.”

“Why on earth didn’t you?” Nightingale asked.

Caroline shrugged. “Mum had other plans.”

“Well,” said Peter, “how do you feel about being an art expert?”

Caroline grinned. “I feel absolutely great about it.”

“Good.” Peter wrote something up on the board with a stick of chalk. “So that’s step one.”


	3. The Second Go Job

While Caroline was off pretending to be an art expert and getting an idea of what sort of security systems they were going to be dealing with, Peter and Abigail went to see Elsie Winstanley and explain why they didn’t have the books that they’d been supposed to deliver a week and a half ago. They met her, not at the British Library or in a café or anything actually sensible, but in Peter’s parents’ flat.

“It’s perfectly sensible,” said Peter. “She’s been friends with mum for years and there’s nothing suspicious about me visiting my parents. And you live here.”

“Not with your parents, I don’t,” said Abigail, but she couldn’t really get out of it and Nightingale was still stuck at Molly’s because of the thing where he’d come this bloody close to getting your femoral artery severed, Thomas, do you hear me? (That had been Dr Walid, who was a lot paler and more Scottish than Abigail had expected, and apparently a gastroenterologist, which didn’t seem much help when Nightingale had had shrapnel in his leg but nobody was asking Abigail for advice there.)

Beverley had muttered something about not being ready to meet Peter’s mother and having important things to do, which confirmed most of Abigail’s worst suspicions there, but at least Aunt Mamusu would be happy when she found out, except she already probably knew. Peter wouldn’t be happy, because thirty seconds later he’d be being asked about when he was going to provide his mother with grandchildren, but that was Peter’s poor planning.

So Abigail and Peter were sitting around his parents’ Formica-covered sized-for-four-but-only-if-they-were-skinny dining table, while his mum watched football around the corner and pretended not to eavesdrop. His dad was out. This seemed like a very dangerous strategy to Abigail, since Peter didn’t want his mum to know what they were doing, but again: nobody was asking her.

“We had them and we lost them,” Peter said to Dr Winstanley. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, I do understand.” Dr Winstanley frowned at her teacup. “When Mamusu suggested I speak with you I really wasn’t expecting things to become this…complex. I suppose now you’ll have to approach some of your former colleagues. I don’t fancy the odds, but -”

Abigail snorted. “Not likely.”

“No,” Peter said. “We’ve got…we’ve got a good team. I’m not telling you we can’t; I’m telling you it’s going to take a bit longer.”

“I’d feel much more comfortable if you’d tell me who they were,” said Dr Winstanley.

Peter hesitated, but not for long. “Obviously you’ve met Abigail -”

“Indeed. Such a clever girl with computers, your mother tells me.”

Abigail tried to look like this was the sort of compliment Dr Winstanley obviously thought it was, and alright, it was nice Aunt Mamusu said nice things about her, but she probably thought Peter was clever with computers, too. Then again Peter was her only son and she thought he was clever at everything, even though Peter had laughed when Abigail had told him that.

“And the others?” Dr Winstanley said, raising her eyebrows.

“Beverley Brook Thames,” said Peter, the first time Abigail had heard him use Beverley’s whole name. “She’s, um…”

“One of Mama Thames’ girls, I know.”

“And Thomas Nightingale.”

“Well.” The eyebrows rose again, much higher. “I suppose if you know Beverley it explains – that is rather an impressive little group. I see why you have some confidence. His older brother studied with Harold Postmartin at Oxford, if I recall correctly. I know the family a little.”

“I don’t think he’s much like anybody else in his family,” said Peter. “Not that I know very much about his family.”

“He’s _sui generis_ , certainly,” Dr Winstanley agreed. “Goodness. This is making me think back to my younger days. Such a pity I’m not in a position to give you a hand, but one has to be aware of one’s limits.”

“Er – right,” said Peter.

“Is Postmartin your friend you talked about in the story with the grenades?” Abigail asked.

“Yes, he is.” Dr Winstanley smiled cheerily. “A very reliable chap, but also, sadly, not able to do what he could a few decades ago. Time catches up with all of us.”

“Huh,” said Peter, giving Abigail a look that said she was going to have to tell that story later. “I am sorry I don’t have better news for you right now.”

“These things take time, I know.” Dr Winstanley sipped her tea. “Just try to avoid getting blown up again any time soon. It’s terribly draining.”

The TV was still on, but Aunt Mamusu appeared behind Peter. “Are these two bothering you for old stories, Elsie? That’s all young people seem to care about in stories, explosions and things.”

“Much more exciting to hear about than to experience, it’s true.”

Peter’s expression was an absolute study, but luckily for him, his mum couldn’t see it. She would have told him off for making faces.

“Don’t make that sort of face, Abigail Kamara,” said Aunt Mamusu. “It’s like you think everything that happened before you were born is made up.”

Peter sniggered, which was completely unfair of him.

Abigail tried to remember why she’d agreed to come.

*

The next three days were just frustrating; Abigail needed to get into Sotheby’s computers and it wasn’t happening with any of her normal tools. She was beginning to suspect they might have been secured by someone actually, well, competent.

Nightingale found her leaning back in her chair, scrolling through Twitter, while her last-shot program ran. If this didn’t work she was going to have to do something clever.

“Oh, hello, Abigail,” he said. “Are you done, then?”

“No, still working on it,” Abigail told him. He looked blankly from her to the laptop she was using as a station, and she sighed. “You want to know the truth about hacking? Ninety percent of it is running scripts and seeing what you get back.The other ten percent is trying to code the scripts and swearing when you forget a curly bracket. And talking people into giving you their passwords. All that typing frantically while white text scrolls across the scene stuff is just to make it look cool in movies. There’s nothing for me to do until that finishes running.”

“What a terrible disappointment,” he said, but not in a sarcastic way, or at least if it was, only sarcastic at himself. “Although I suppose we all have our mundane tasks.”

“Martial arts and stuff is like that, right?” Abigail asked. “Like, in movies it’s all punching concrete blocks and, like, training by carrying people on your back and stuff, but I bet in real life you just do a lot of push-ups.”

“There’s a little bit more to it than that, but more or less.” He hesitated, and then said “Magic is much the same.”

“I dunno about either of them,” Abigail had to confess. “I wanted to do karate or something when I was a kid, but there wasn’t anywhere to go I wouldn’t have had to get picked up afterwards and – anyway, yeah, I have no idea. That’s what we have you for, the punching people bit.”

Nightingale looked at her consideringly. “If you have nothing to do until that finishes running, would you like to learn how to hit someone without hurting yourself, at least?”

Abigail tried to look like she was thinking about this for at least a couple of seconds, because she didn’t want to seem too enthusiastic, but it wasn’t really a question she was going to say no to. “Okay, I mean, sure. This is going to take an hour, maybe two if they’re using an extra IP range I’m not expecting.”

Which was how Peter found them with the old punching bag on the second floor – really old, it let out little drifts of sawdust with every hit, and Nightingale was frowning at it – forty minutes later. Abigail wondered for a second if he’d throw some sort of weird “how dare you instruct my baby cousin in the ways of violence” fit, but he grinned. “Are you two having fun?”

“This hurts a lot more than it looks like it does,” said Abigail.

“It’s good for you to know,” said Peter. “Just in case.” He looked at Nightingale. “I hope you’re not teaching her Marquis of Queensbury rules or any of that bullshit.”

Nightingale looked positively offended. “I’m not trying to teach her how to box.”

“Good,” said Peter.

Nightingale gave him a thoughtful look. “How would you rate your abilities with self-defence?”

“I can wrestle a drunk into the back of a police van, no problem,” said Peter. “But I didn’t really learn to fight fair.”

“We should test that out at some point,” said Nightingale, and he made it sound like he was thinking about hitting Peter, which was such a guy thing, or like he was hitting _on_ Peter, which was – also such a guy thing.

“We probably should,” said Peter, and Abigail concentrated so hard on her next swing – so she didn’t make a face at their idea of flirting – that a seam on the bag actually split.

“We’re going to need a replacement,” said Nightingale.

“Yeah, because I don’t think I’m developing superpowers,” Abigail said, and checked the time. “Okay, I have to go do some more hacking stuff. Can we do this again, sometime, maybe?”

“Certainly,” said Nightingale.

“Some hacking stuff?” said Peter, complete with air quotes.

“I don’t want to overwhelm you with technical detail,” Abigail told them, and escaped before she got asked for any. She didn’t think they wanted to hear about the pros and cons of Metasploit vs CANVAS, anyway.

*

“What I don’t get,” said Caroline two days later outside the company that Sotheby’s had outsourced important parts of their IT and alarm system to, “is why we’re breaking in here in the first place. Can’t Abigail just…” She waved her hands in a way that would have meant “do something magic” if she was literally anybody else. “Do some, you know, computer magic?”

“Computers and magic don’t mix,” said Abigail; she’d figured that out after the phone fiasco the day the first heist had gone wrong. “So really, no, I can't.”

“Computers and _your_ magic don’t mix,” said Beverley.

“I know that,” Caroline said with that careless sort of scorn posh people were so good at. “I meant hacking stuff.”

“Sure, I could try,” Abigail said. “I could sit back at Molly’s place eating crisps and DDOS-ing their firewall until it falls over, if we had a month or two, which we don’t. I tried it for three days. So instead I’m going to get in here and do some rearrangement of the wiring, and then I can go back to Molly’s and handle it in a day or two. Which is _way_ better for our timetable.”

“And we’re not walking in the front door because –”

“Cameras,” chorused Abigail and Beverley.

“You’ve got ten seconds until he comes back,” Beverley added, “so if you want to start doing your bit –”

Caroline sighed. “Fine; _fine._ ” She flicked some of her long hair over her shoulder – she had a seriously impressive wig collection – hiked her blouse down slightly, and stumbled around the corner. Her whole body suddenly went loose, like she’d had about ten drinks hit her at once, and she teetered on her heels as if she’d never worn a pair before. She had the security guard’s attention right away.

 _“_ Oh _hiiiiii!_ ” was the last thing Abigail heard her say, in pure Estuary. “You’ve got to help me, I dropped my purse and –”

There was a click behind her.

“In!” Beverley said. “C’mon, I’ve got thirty seconds to cycle the alarm –”

Abigail darted into the building after her. “Coming!”

Beverley did something complicated to the lock. Abigail watched it a little wistfully; she’d been trying, with one of Bev’s old spare sets, but she found lock picking monumentally tedious, feeling for tiny movements you couldn’t see. It felt like something she _should_ be good at, but she just wasn’t – well, yet. Lots of time to get better, after all.

“Done.” Beverley blew some dust on the keypad, frowned, and tapped out a code; Abigail held her breath until she saw Beverley’s shoulders relax. “Where are we going now?”

“This way,” Abigail said, pulling up the building schematic on her phone. “First right, then up the staircase -”

Beverley had to pick the lock on the server room door as well (“I don’t know why they even bothered with this, really”) and then it was Abigail’s turn; it took her ten minutes to locate the CAT6 cable she needed in the morass of wires and cables someone should be ashamed about, two to disconnect it, and ten seconds to plug in her man-in-the-middle device with its tiny Bluetooth transmitter that was going to relay to the raspberry Pi she had under the counter in the café in the bottom of the building. Child’s play, really.

“I could have done that,” Beverley said, over her shoulder. “If you’d given me a picture.”

“This way I know it’s done right.”

“You were plugging in an Ethernet cable. That’s not hard.”

“At least two of the people we work with don’t even know what Ethernet is,” Abigail pointed out. “And they both grew up in the nineties, so they have no excuses.”

“Thomas might have grown up in the nineties, but I think spiritually he grew up in the eighteen-nineties,” said Beverley. “And Caroline’s mum sounds like a real hippie. She probably grew up thinking wifi gives you cancer.”

“Well, alright,” said Abigail. “Next time I need an Ethernet cable plugged in, I’ll let you do it.”

“You worried they’ll spot that?” Beverley nodded to where Abigail’s device was now nestled in the proverbial haystack.

“Nah.” They shut the server closet and Beverley rattled it to check the lock. “It’s such a mess in there I bet nobody’s going to go diving until something catches on fire. They probably underpay their junior IT staff.”

“According to you everybody underpays their IT staff.”

“Well, obviously,” said Abigail. “If junior staff got paid really well I’d be doing that instead of this. Way easier.”

Beverley snorted like she didn’t believe that. Abigail wasn’t sure she did either, but that was how it went. She was her dad’s daughter and she wouldn’t have turned to a life of crime if she’d had better options. Right?

They reached the exit, which was much easier to leave than enter; just a button to open the door.

“Hey, I could have got myself out of here,” Abigail said.

“Embarrassing, really,” agreed Beverley.

Caroline was waiting. “I think the guard’s still looking for my purse,” she said brightly. “All done?”

“You _are_ good.” Beverley sounded genuinely impressed. “All done as far as I know.”

“Yep,” said Abigail. “Let’s get out of here.”

They’d stashed Peter’s car ten minutes’ walk away, because some things you couldn’t catch the Tube home from and a midnight break-in to a highly secured location was one of them.

They got stuck in traffic for twenty minutes; an accident at a roundabout.

“We should have got the Tube,” said Caroline, tapping her fingers on the ledge below the car window. She was driving. Abigail couldn’t, and the consensus among everybody, if everybody included Peter and Nightingale, was that Beverley shouldn’t if someone else could. Beverley graciously allowed this to stand as long as her car wasn’t the mode of transport. Personally, Abigail thought she was too nice about that, but Beverley had explained it as “Why should I bother if someone else wants to drive me somewhere?”, which was a fair point, really.

*

The midnight raid had data pouring through Abigail’s VPN the very next morning, which gave them everything they needed – the day after that, when she’d worked out how to get around the system. It also introduced a fairly serious problem. When Abigail spotted it, she groaned out loud. “Oh, you’re fucking kidding me.”

Nobody said anything. She looked around to see that Peter, who’d been fiddling around with the TV, wasn't there anymore. She sighed and went looking.

“You’re not going to like this,” she said to Peter when she found him in what had clearly been a library once and wasn’t anymore. It had taken her longer than she’d expected to get there because Beverley had been doing something complicated with a lot of strapping in the middle of the foyer and had made loud disapproving noises when Abigail had tried to step over it. “Also, what _is_ Bev doing out there?”

“Sorting out her heights gear,” Peter said. “She says she doesn’t have nearly enough room to do it properly at her house. What aren’t I going to like?”

“It’s no good just getting into the warehouse,” Abigail said. “I mean, it is good, but then we’re going to be stuck with crates we can’t open.”

“What do you mean, crates we can’t open?” Peter sat up, switching to full attention.

“Here,” Abigail said, showing him the specs. “It’s an extra security measure - not something from Sotheby’s, but they recorded the model number when they took possession. The books are in metal crates. I was hoping they’d take a fingerprint, because that’s easy, but it’s a two-factor system with a physical second factor, not an app. The passcode I can deal with. We’ve got to get our hands on the physical bit, somehow.”

“Okay,” Peter said, sounding dubious. “Is there a reason we can’t just break out a hacksaw?”

“If it was that easy we wouldn’t even bother with the hacksaw, we've got the Nightingale. And whatever Caroline can do,” Abigail said. Peter looked skeptical at this. “Look, have you even asked him what he’s good for?”

“Lots of things,” Peter said promptly, then looked mildly alarmed, for some reason. “But I figured it’s not like he’s going to be “oh, yes, I’ve got three sixth-level spell slots”, you know? And…” He went suspiciously neutral. “If he wanted to tell me he could have.”

“Probably not, but you can ask,” said Abigail. “And then you can tell me, because I really want to know. But my point is, he’s got a nickname for a reason, and I’m not thinking about that because these things are designed to be seriously impervious to physical attacks and most of the stuff that would work is probably going to damage the books. It’s going to be way easier to just open the locks.”

“I don’t think his actual surname qualifies as a nickname,” Peter said. “But fine. Where do you think our man’s going to keep a physical two-factor key? On his key ring?”

“Maybe,” Abigail said. “Which would be a problem. But you can damage them knocking them around, so I’m hoping - _hoping -_ it’s just at his house.”

“That…has certain other advantages,” Peter said slowly. “Where’s that?”

“High Wycombe. Out of the city.”

Peter sighed. “Of course it bloody well is. Okay. You dig up some schematics, I’ll grab everybody and we’ll figure this out.”

*

Abigail could see from the access she still had to the Finlayson Amberley system that Chorley was scheduled to travel to the US for three days the next week, so raiding his house for the two-factor key was going to have to wait until then. In the meantime, she kept busy. Molly had agreed that Abigail could put in at least a _couple_ of cameras at her place, just to cover entrances and exits, nothing fancy, but using wireless signals for that sort of thing was absolutely asking for trouble and when Abigail had tried, because she’d been feeling lazy, it had turned out the walls of this place blocked signals at weird angles. Chicken-wire, probably, or something like that. Old buildings were the worst for wi-fi. Anyway, it had been the universe reminding her what she should be doing, so there had been a lot of swearing and wielding of various tools and laying of ethernet cables. Mostly not by Abigail; she’d made Peter do it, and Peter had made Nightingale help him. An extra foot of height really counted when you were trying to keep cabling out of the way. Molly had hovered the entire time to make sure they weren’t doing any more damage than necessary.

Most of the cameras didn’t have mikes because that wasn’t at all the point, but she’d set one up on the back entrance and the front. She was in the room over the garage - Peter persisted in calling it a coach house - checking everything was working when she saw Peter walk into the frame and switched the volume on, meaning to text him and ask him to talk.

Instead the mike caught the sound of the back door opening. “Ah, Peter,” said Nightingale, tinny but distinct. “How did it go?”

“Almost as badly as it could have,” Peter replied, sounding casual. He’d crossed underneath the camera and Abigail couldn’t see his face, so she couldn’t tell if it really was casual. Nightingale was behind the camera as well.

“Surely not,” he said. “You don’t seem to have been arrested, or…”

“Are you seriously telling me you think she’d have hurt me?” Peter crossed back into view, leaning against the wall. “That’s not what I was worried about.”

“One should always be prepared.” Nightingale came into view; he didn’t have the crutch today, Abigail noticed, although it was still early. “But –”

“I got the tracker on.” Peter smiled, but not like he was happy, or he thought something was funny. “She’ll probably find it by the end of the day, but…she’s definitely working for Chorley. We were set up.”

Beverley came into view as well. “Do you have any ideas why?”

“Yes,” Peter said. “No. She liked being police. She didn’t like the cases that ran into a brick wall because somebody knew somebody. I thought she wanted to do things right. I thought…well, what the hell did I know about her, apparently.”

“And you’re feeling alright about that?”

“I’m having very violent feelings towards this helpless wall,” Peter said, but he didn’t move. “But that doesn’t help, really. All you get is bruises, and the wall stays where it is.” He picked up Nightingale’s hand and ran his thumb over the knuckles, and didn’t let go. Abigail looked behind herself, reflexively, in case Molly was about to catch her eavesdropping - or worse, Caroline.

Bev walked over and nestled in next to him. “We can always do something about her once this job’s done, if she doesn’t get caught up in it.”

“I can’t believe I have to say this,” Peter said, “but please don’t kill anybody. It would be very upsetting.”

“Noted,” Nightingale said, far too cheerfully, and Abigail closed the window before it could get any weirder or more personal.

She found Peter later that afternoon.

“You know,” Abigail said, “if you wanted to plant trackers on Lesley you should have asked me. You probably got terrible consumer-grade ones you can see from a mile away.”

“Credit me with a minor amount of competence in keeping an eye on people who don’t want me to,” Peter said. “I’m not totally technologically incompetent. I leave that to Nightingale.”

“Incompetent’s…probably fair there,” Abigail said, momentarily diverted. “Okay, maybe not, it’s just that he doesn’t care. Still. That’s what I’m here for, right?”

“Fine,” Peter agreed, and then, finally, did the double-take he should have done two minutes ago. “How do you - you’ve got the security cameras running, haven’t you.”

“I wasn’t eavesdropping on _purpose._ I was just setting them up and you walked in.”

“I think I believe you.” Peter gave her a thoughtful look. “So you know where we’re at with Lesley.”

“Nothing I hadn’t figured. She wasn’t my friend, anyway.” Abigail paused. “Do you think - never mind.”

“Think what?”

“That she was planning for us to get blown up?”

“You, no,” Peter said. “I think throwing you to the wolves along with Caroline was her trying to keep you away. Bev and Thomas, definitely. Me…I don’t know. If she did she had second thoughts. I hope not.”

“I can do without that sort of favour.”

“Yeah,” said Peter. “Can’t we all.”

*

The next day, the movement sensor on the back door camera - the one over the courtyard, not just inside - pinged her phone, and Abigail went to look. It was a woman dressed in a pale green hijab and a seriously cool black leather jacket. Abigail managed to open the door just as she was raising her hand to knock, which was a nice trick if Abigail did think so herself, and the woman frowned doubtfully at her. “What are you doing here?”

“Do I know you?” Abigail countered. “What are you doing here?”

“I’m looking for Peter,” said the woman; her voice sounded familiar but Abigail couldn’t quite place it. Molly’s dog Toby, apparently attracted by the sound of voices and therefore people who might give him attention or food, came trotting down the corridor behind Abigail to sniff at her feet.

“Be polite,” Abigail said, grabbing his collar; he sat with a whuff.

The woman eyed him with the dubious look of someone who’d had to deal with disobedient small animals before. “Is he yours?”

“Nah, he just lives here. What’s your name again?”

“I didn’t say,” said the woman, and then Nightingale came in the back gate, shutting it with a clang before he spotted them across the yard, and the woman spun around, every bit of her attention going to him, and vice versa once he laid eyes on her. He shifted his weight in a way that made Abigail decide now was a good time to scoop up Toby and retreat a step into the doorway. Technically she was way closer to the woman than he was, but even with that she knew all she was going to do was get in the way. He started to cross the courtyard at a brisk pace, not a run but with a very clear direction.

The woman darted a hand towards the inside of her jacket before jerking it back, curled into a fist, visibly forcing herself to take a moment.

“I’m here,” she said, very clearly, “to talk to Peter. Alright?”

“Mmm,” said Nightingale, but not like he agreed.

“If I wanted to arrest you,” the woman said, again slowly and clearly, “I wouldn’t be giving you fair warning.”

That was when it clicked; Abigail pulled another step back, putting herself behind the door, and tried to juggle dog and phone from her pocket, although the phone was probably playing with fire. She managed to tap out _Guleed back door_ and send it to Peter as the other two kept talking.

“You know,” said Nightingale, “I’ve heard that before – well, close enough to that.”

“I would have to give you fair warning if I wanted to try and kill you, that goes with the job description,” said the woman, “but I’m not trying to do that either. Can we just have a chat?”

“Who – oh, shit,” said Caroline, coming up behind Abigail. “Isn’t she police?”

Guleed looked back, frustration crossing her face as she obviously realised she was surrounded. Toby whined and wriggled.

“Go find Molly,” Abigail muttered in his ear, and put him down, but he stayed and growled. “Oh, come on!”

By that point Nightingale had crossed the courtyard, and Guleed was looking seriously worried.

“I just want to talk to Peter,” she said.

“Hi, Sahra,” said Peter; the corridor was getting crowded. “Is there a special reason you’re here?”

“If you mean, how did I find you,” she said, “I spent a lot of downtime with traffic camera records. Otherwise I’d have been here sooner. Can we have a chat without the audience?”

“We can have a chat, definitely,” said Peter. “Come on in.”

“Really?” Caroline said.

“It’s fine,” said Nightingale, having made eye contact with Peter and apparently been told something.

“I’ll just…” Abigail said, and darted inside before anybody could stop her; she needed to ask a favour of Beverley.

*

“Biscuit, Sahra?” Peter said, when he and Guleed were seated in the big atrium. The kitchen was way cosier, but Molly had been emphatic about where chatting should happen; in this whole big mysterious building, the kitchen seemed to be her true domain. Abigail got that. You couldn’t really call a whole place as big as this home. If Aunt Mamusu had a house like this she’d have rented out every room, including the old library.

Guleed – Sahra, reached, then hesitated, eyes darting to Beverley and then back to Peter. “Just a biscuit? No obligations attached.”

Peter raised his eyebrows. “What obligations?”

Sahra stared at him for a very long moment. “Don’t be silly.”

“No obligations,” said Beverley firmly.

“This your house, then?”

“No, but Molly doesn’t bother with stuff like that,” Beverley said. Peter looked like he was doing sums in his head and not liking the answers. “What makes you ask a question like that?”

“Mike,” said Sahra, a little indistinctly because it was around a custard cream. Abigail poked Beverley in the arm and got one passed to her, along with Sahra’s phone. Then she slouched back against the wall, just in Sahra's blind spot, and got to work. “You know, he -”

“I don’t, but let’s pretend I do,” said Peter, taking a biscuit himself. Abigail wondered who ‘Mike’ was, but she was too busy to check the contacts list on the phone. “Okay, now that’s out of the way, it’s not that I don’t appreciate the chance to catch up, but…”

“Do you know who Lesley May’s working for these days?” Sahra asked.

“Yes,” said Peter. Beverley kissed her teeth.

“Because he hasn’t got any less dodgy,” said Sahra. “And what I was wondering is whether  is whether you were doing the same thing.”

There was a long pause; Abigail stopped what she was doing to look up. She couldn’t really see Beverley’s face, but Peter was totally expressionless. It was remarkably like the same expression Aunt Mamusu got when people asked stupid questions about Uncle Richard, and just about as terrifying, at least if you were smart. Maybe Sahra Guleed wasn't.

“No,” Peter said, and the air unfroze. “And I’m disappointed you thought you needed to ask.”

“You know why I did,” said Sahra, with the barest touch of apology. “Because here’s what I also know: he’s reported, or his company has but really it’s him, having a bunch of very valuable books stolen, and I know your mum has an old friend who works for the British Library, and here you are hanging out with…well. You want me to say it?”

“Do say it,” said Beverley. “I’m really curious how you’re going to phrase that.”

“If it’ll set your mind at rest,” said Peter, “I can assure you that, no matter what you think about who I’m hanging out with, those books are not in my possession or any of theirs, and none of us have the faintest idea where they are.”

“I figured.” Abigail wasn't looking again because she didn’t have time, but she was willing to bet Sahra had just rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I’m asking about.”

“Okay, then you want to tell me what you are asking about? Because I’d love to think you’re just checking in out of friendly concern, but -”

“Have you got anything linking him to the bodies we found? And don’t,” Sahra pushed on. “Don’t tell me they tossed you out and you don’t care and you don’t remember, don’t tell me they don’t matter, because I know none of those things are true.”

“Do you think,” Peter said, “I wouldn’t have turned that over if I did have it?”

“I remember one of those, I think,” Beverley said. “There was a body in the Thames.” She put her hand around behind the back of her chair and wiggled her fingers; Abigail tapped faster, careful to keep the pad of her fingers down. She needed to trim her nails again. “It’s amazing what people chuck into rivers.”

“It wasn’t just a body, it was a person.” Sahra was glaring at Beverley’s face and not her hands; Abigail double-checked the settings and slipped the phone back into Beverley’s hand. Then Sahra turned back to Peter; perfect. “Look, you were a good copper, no matter what anybody said and no matter what happened. If you get something useful – something we can take to court, you know how it all works – I can make sure it works out.”

“Sahra.” Peter leant forward, elbows on his knees. “I believe you when you say that. But it wasn’t you that decided an obvious frame-up was proof I was nicking from the evidence locker, and it wasn’t you who decided that even though it was a frame-up it wasn’t worth pushing back against, and it won’t be you who decides to prosecute.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not worth trying.” Sahra folded her arms; there was the slightest movement of her jacket fabric on the side Beverley was sitting on, but only because Abigail was watching.

“The boss know you’re here?” Peter asked, leaning back and picking up his teacup.

“Of course not,” said Beverley.

“Of course not,” said Sahra, with a sideways glance. “She’s got to be able to swear things in court that I don’t, necessarily. And there’s someone…I mean, other than Lesley.” She hesitated. “You know it was Lesley, right?”

“I do now,” said Peter. “And you couldn’t have told me that –“

“You’d quit, you were gone, it wasn’t your problem!” Sahra threw up her hands.

“Was it Lesley who told you she didn’t remember, didn’t care?”

“You know it was,” said Sahra. “I was hoping she had something too, hoping she was trying a double-agent thing.”

“We all were.”

Abigail considered saying ‘were we?’ but didn’t want to ruin the moment.

“The thing is,”Sahra went on. “That means whatever you do get has to be – has to be flashy, okay, it has to be big and undeniable and involve about fifteen different units and make our numbers look great. It can’t just be true. It has to be something the higher-ups _want_ to be true. Then the wheels go into motion and the rest of it will come out, or at least we’ll make it so he can't keep going on the same way.”

“That’s a big if,” said Peter. “Can you just…leave this alone for now?”

“That’s a big thing to ask,” said Sahra. “Speaking of undeniable things the higher-ups don’t want to be true – where’s your mate Thomas?”

“Oh, checking the perimeter or something like that.” Peter gave a disarming smile, or what Abigail supposed was meant to be one. Peter seemed to come across differently to people who hadn’t known him since ages ago.

“And your other friend,” Sahra added, pointedly. “Tall lady, very nice taste in clothes, looks like she came from the same part of the world as me. I don’t think I’ve been introduced. Old friend from Peckwater Estate, is she?”

“Something like that,” Peter lied shamelessly. “I don’t think you have met her, though.”

Sahra sighed. “This is always so much easier when I’m talking to someone who doesn’t know how the conversation goes.”

“Isn’t it just.” Peter put down his teacup. “Sahra, like I told you once – I appreciate the concern but it’s not necessary.”

“Riiight,” Sahra said, drawing it out. “Peter –“ she cocked her head. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Working out what I’m going to do with the rest of my life,” said Peter. “Fair enough, don’t you think?”

“Oh,” said Sahra. “Now I’m worried.”

*

“How’d that go?” Beverley asked as soon as Peter had escorted Sahra towards the door she’d come in.

“Great,” said Abigail, pulling out her own phone – the one she was working with right now, anyway. “We can listen into her calls anytime we want, or send her messages without it going through the unencrypted network.”

“I don’t think we’re going to want to do that.” Beverley wrinkled her nose. “Peter’s just a bit nostalgic right now. He’ll get over it.”

“I hope we don’t want to do that,” said Caroline, frankly, coming down the main stairs; she’d been lurking on the mezzanine.

“How could you even hear anything from up there?” Abigail asked.

“Magic,” said Caroline with some satisfaction, and grinned. “Ask nicely and maybe one day I’ll show you.”

“I’m asking nicely,” said Abigail immediately.

“I said one day,” said Caroline. “Seriously, though – she’s a cop, they’re…” She made a face. “Mum would say, ‘such an authoritarian lot’, but she sounds like she believes that sort of thing and I’ve never got the hang of it.”

“I’m pretty sure you do believe it,” said Beverley, “but some of them are, you know, occasionally alright. Or at least they mean well.”

“Peter’s not a cop anymore, you don’t have to make excuses,” said Abigail.

“I’m not – he always did mean well.” Beverley’s lips tightened briefly, in anger or regret or something else complicated that Abigail didn’t really want to know about.

“There’s no need to denigrate DS Guleed,” said Nightingale, appearing from the doors that led to the front lobby – maybe he really had been checking the perimeter. “If she’s here that means they’re running into dead ends at Peter’s old unit, which means they’re desperate, which means if we do cross paths with them again while this is going on they have an excellent incentive to look the other way – or at least one or two of them do. And that is good for us, and particularly,” he nodded at Caroline, “it’s good for your mother, if that’s still something you’re worried about. I think you should be.”

“Are you lot all standing around here gossiping?” Peter was back. “Abigail, how’d it go?”

“I had her phone for a whole five minutes, I basically own it now,” said Abigail.

“Good,” said Peter. “Well, not for Sahra, and not really for the basic integrity of the Met if she really is waiting on evidence from us, but good for getting on with things.”

“Is the basic integrity of the Met, unquote, something that really keeps you up at night?” Caroline looked highly skeptical at this concept.

“Only when there’s nothing better on offer,” Peter said, and kept talking before anybody else in the room could say something, thank god. “Okay, then, Abigail, can you check –”

*

Chorley’s house was on a hill - something like a castle. Abigail noticed the solar panels. Handy in power cuts, and environmentally friendly as well. She was getting the sense the environment might be the only thing this guy was friendly to. Peter hadn’t asked her to look into him, saying he had everything he needed from the police investigation he’d been pulled off back when, but Abigail had done some googling and she could read between the lines. Conservative think tanks, investment firm, messy divorce case with a wife and daughter who’d moved to Australia. Add that to what Peter had said about the blackmail and labour rights violations and the stuff he hadn’t said but Abigail had heard anyway, and that looked a lot like the kind of person whose nearest and dearest had had to move to the other side of the planet to get away from. Charming.

Caroline was helping her set up when Abigail spotted a fox watching them from the bushes. It could have been a normal fox - this wasn’t London - but Abigail had a feeling.

“Hi,” she said. “You live around here?”

The fox didn’t respond. Caroline laughed, quietly. “You talk to foxes a lot? Do they talk back?”

“Only when it suits them,” said Abigail. The cardboard tab on the box with the antenna was stuck, and she had to dig her fingernails in to pry it out. When she looked up, the fox was still there.

“I’ve got a mate in the city,” she offered. “Dan. Do you know him?”

“No,” said the fox. Caroline drew in a sharp breath. “Long way from here to there. But I think we’ve got friends in common. Who’re you?”

“I’m Abigail,” said Abigail. “This is Caroline.”

The fox trotted closer, cautiously, and sniffed. “She’s a wizard.”

“I think I’m more of a witch,” said Caroline, equally cautious, like she was trying to remember if she’d eaten anything funny today.

“Abigail,” said the fox, sitting down on its haunches. “I think I’ve heard about you, too. You pay for computer parts.”

“Only good stuff.” Truthfully it had been a couple of years since she’d got anything really good from a fox, but it was always fun to check out lost flash drives on an air-gapped box. Once there’d been folders from what was obviously an MI5 briefing. Abigail still had that one somewhere. She hadn’t figured out what to do with it. “Why, you got something?”

“Nah, not so much out here,” said the fox. “Check out that house, though, you’d find plenty.”

“Pay with what?” asked Caroline.

“Food,” said Abigail. “Stuff for dens. Sometimes cash.”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

The fox let out the weird raspy noise that passed for a laugh for them. “It’s amazing what humans will give you if they think you’re smart enough to give them a two-pound coin for it. Daylight robbery, practically.”

“Nah, they’re paying for the experience,” said Abigail. “Listen - the bloke who lives in that house. Know anything about him?”

The fox shrank back. “I don’t, and I’m not getting close enough to find out more.”

“What happened?” Caroline asked, gently.

“We used to get into his rubbish bins, but then a vixen got caught in a trap,” said the fox. “Humans kill us, normally we go out with the garbage, or get buried in the garden. She never came out. Or - bits of her did.”

“Animal cruelty,” said Abigail. “That’s always a great sign.”

“We just call it torture,” said the fox.

“Fair cop. What about a short blonde white woman - seen one around the house lately?”

The fox cocked its head, thinking. “Maybe last week. I’m not staking the place out - I don’t go near it.”

“Alright,” said Abigail. “Worth asking.”

“What are you doing?” The fox asked in return. “And don’t think I haven’t noticed one of the London Rivers sneaking around down there, and another wizard as well.”

“When we’re finished,” Abigail said, “our friend in the house isn’t going to be around to disappear any more of your friends.”

“Hmm,” the fox said, not sounding convinced. Its tail flicked. “Good luck with that.” It stood up. “And mind yourselves in the woods right behind the house. There’s traps.”

“What kind –” Caroline started to say, but the fox was gone into the trees.

“Well that was ominous,” said Abigail. “Hold this for me.”

“Should we call the others?”

“When we’re done,” Abigail said. “I don’t think fox traps are going to get in their way very much.”

Caroline pressed her lips together. She looked much more disturbed than Abigail thought the situation called for. “Right.”

 

*

“God, this is boring,” said Caroline fifteen minutes later, once they were all set up and Abigail was tapping on her keyboard as quietly as possible.

“Quiet,” said Abigail. “I’m working.” She frowned at her screen. “Can you move that antenna to the right – no, not that much – okay, yes, leave it there.”

“I don’t see why we need to hack his house.”

“It’s smart,” said Abigail. “Which means it’s insanely dumb. It’s only part of it though, that’s the weird thing – the main door and bedrooms and kitchen and all of that, they’re on here, I’ve got access to the lights and the doors and all the rest of it, but the garage and the rooms above it are off the grid. Why would he only wire up half of it? If you’re going to pick convenience over security –“

“There’s no electronics in half the house?” Abigail looked up; Caroline’s voice was suddenly sharp.

“I just mean part of it isn’t hooked up to the smart system,” she said. “There might be electronics, I can’t tell from this where things are physically, just that they’re on the network. I know about the rooms because they’re listed by doors and lights. There could be half a Maplin in the garage, there probably is if he has shiny new cars, I wouldn’t know. Actually now you mention it…” She spent a minute clicking around and booted up something else on her spare phone. Someone on Reddit claimed the programme could scan for Teslas, which seemed like exactly the sort of thing –

“He doesn’t.” Caroline’s mouth tightened. “He has a 1970s Ferrari, Peter was going through the records, and – shit. Shit. I bet that’s how Mum knows him. And the fox - _shit._ ”

Abigail pushed her laptop screen down. “Do you want to explain?”

“He’s a wizard and if we get caught we’re fucked,” Caroline said, succinctly. “Are you done now? I think you should be done as soon as you can be.”

“You’re a wizard,” said Abigail.

“Yes, so I know how much I don’t want to get into a fight with another wizard if I can avoid it,” said Caroline. “Not that it wouldn’t be fun but it’d ruin all your toys, for starters.”

Abigail hunched protectively over her laptop. “Alright! I’m working as fast as I can.”

Nightingale appeared out of nowhere, and Caroline spun around, a trail of crimson smoke forming and then dispersing in the air next to her. The laptop screen flickered, and Abigail tapped the case irritably. She didn’t want to lose another one yet.

“It looks clear,” he said, “but is there a reason for us to be on edge?”

“I think he’s a wizard,” said Caroline.

“Hmmm,” said Nightingale. “Concerning.”

“Alright, let’s go,” said Abigail, standing and brushing leaf litter off her trousers. “I can get us in and out whenever you want now and it’s not even going to register.”

*

“Alright,” said Beverley; Abigail brought up the security camera over the front door. “Remind me again what we’re looking for?”

“A two-factor authentication device,” said Peter. “Maybe a card with numbers and letters on it –”

“It’s not that, I’d have told you if it was that,” Abigail corrected him; Beverley and Peter were now moving quickly from camera to camera. It was so creepy to have your place wired up like that – who even did that? Even some of the bedrooms had cameras. No wonder Mrs Chorley had moved Down Under. “It’s an electronic random number generator. Like a pager. I think. I’ve never really seen a pager.”

“I hate to hurry you up,” came Nightingale’s voice, “but there’s something moving around out here.”

“Is it a fox?” Abigail asked. “It’s okay if it’s a fox. Probably.” She didn’t have eyes on Nightingale, or not for longer than a second at a time. He was too good at blending into the shadows, and there were actually more cameras inside than out. So creepy.

“A person-sized something,” said Nightingale.

“Foxes can be people,” said Abigail.

“Are you sure about that?” asked Caroline, who didn’t strictly speaking have to be here but said the whole thing made her too nervous to not at least sit in on Abigail’s end. Add in Molly poking her head in about every five minutes and it was way more company than Abigail was used to. Not that she was used to this sort of thing, really.

“I’m sure,” said Abigail at the same time as Nightingale said “a human-sized something, then, if you prefer.”

Beverley and Peter had made it into the study now, with its paintings that looked like they should be in an art gallery – sad women and a dead guy with a sword, so probably King Arthur, because the Victorians were all about King Arthur for some reason – and its big fuck-off I Am A Very Important Man desk. Abigail had never figured out what you were supposed to do with that much desk space; it wasn’t even good for putting monitors on once you’d set up the first three. Walls were much better for that.

Beverley and Peter were muttering to each other and then started systematically going through drawers. On one of the outside cameras, Abigail’s eye was drawn by a flash of movement; she thought at first it was Nightingale, but something about how it walked was wrong.

“What was – it’s over there now,” said Caroline, leaning forward. Abigail nudged her out of the way. “Do you -”

“Yeah, I see it,” Abigail said. It was not Nightingale. It was not a fox. It was definitely a person in - was that a panda balaclava? What the fuck.

“Guys,” she said urgently. “Guys. Do you know anybody who goes around with sawn-off shotguns and animal-themed balaclavas? Because if you do they’re here.”

“Where?” Nightingale wanted to know.

“Front door, coming around the side now-”

“Ah, fuck,” said Peter.

“Got it!” Beverley said triumphantly in the same second. “Alright, anything else we want while we’re here?”

“We’re not here and we never were, and now we’re going,” said Peter, checking what Beverley held; he held it up to the camera so Abigail could okay it.

“Yes, that’s it,” she said. “Now get back here.”

“Okay, boss,” Peter said, sounding amused.

From somewhere, Abigail couldn’t quite tell, came a series of thumping sounds. The man in the panda balaclava collapsed backwards into view of one of the cameras. He didn’t look particularly conscious.

“I think,” Nightingale said, only slightly short of breath, “it’s the Russians.”

“I knew I should have had a longer chat with them,” Beverley fumed. She and Peter were moving quickly now.

“Who?”

“Do you remember the warehouse we were meeting in?” Nightingale asked.

“The one that got blown up? Yeah, I might.”

“I’m almost sorry I missed that,” said Caroline. “It sounded exciting.”

“It was nearly fatal,” said Peter. “That’s not the kind of excitement you really want in your life.”

“You don’t know my life.”

“True,” said Peter, who absolutely did because Abigail had seen him read the dossier she’d done on Caroline, but to be fair it hadn’t been complete.

“Well,” said Nightingale. “Apparently a couple of the people who were using it prior to us are miffed at its destruction and looking for somebody to blame.”

“I thought they were in jail?”

“If everybody in prison was actually cut off from the outside world my life – would have been a lot easier, back in the day,” said Peter, almost smoothly. “Apart from the minor human rights violation issues. How’s it going?”

Nightingale didn’t say anything, but there were some more indistinct thumping noises and something that might have been a cut-off groan of pain, followed by a very concerning thud.

“If you blow the cameras with magic it’ll be really obvious we were here,” Caroline snapped, “be careful.”

“A little busy!” Nightingale hissed, and then there was a lot more thumping, none of it in view of any camera.

“Fuck!” Beverley said, and she and Peter barreled back through the halls and through the high-ceilinged living spaces to the door they’d come in. They passed under the camera covering it, Abigail locked it with a few taps of her keyboard, and then they were out of sight too.

Abigail glanced at Caroline, who was chewing on a fingernail, then back at the screens. Over comms, there was the panting of people moving quickly, a low choked-off noise that could have come from anybody, and a series of very rapid thwacks.

“Not that he holds grudges, but they did sort of kidnap him once,” said Beverley.

“Guys?” Abigail said, tentatively. Nothing but breathing for a minute more.

The cameras stayed up, and so did the house system.

“We’re good,” said Peter, finally, what felt like an hour later, and Abigail unclenched her hands.

Then Caroline grabbed Abigail’s arm, not painfully but urgently. “Look - over there!” Abigail yelped.

“What is it?” Peter wanted to know.

Abigail saw what Caroline was looking at but it was on one of the night-vision-green feeds and it took her a moment to make out. “There’s another one! South-west corner.”

“I’ll deal with it, meet you at the van,” Nightingale said.

“Hold on, it looks like he’s tripped –” Abigail said, and then there was a wave of…something. Abigail thought she’d bitten her tongue; there was an iron taste of blood, pain and despair. She was trapped, hunted, nowhere to go –

It faded, and she found herself clutching one of the struts of the shelving mounted in the back of the van so hard it hurt. Her fingers were so stiff it was hard to straighten them, and they stung. She’d cut herself, she realised, but her mouth didn’t hurt when she ran her tongue around it, even though the taste of blood lingered. She licked her injured hand, and the salt-sharp taste of the drop or two of her own blood leaking out of her palm made the phantom taste recede, obviously unreal.

Three of the cameras were out.

“Shit,” she said, automatically. “Can anybody hear me?” No response.

She turned to Caroline, who made a funny noise that resolved itself, when Abigail saw her hunched position, into retching.

“Ughhhhhhhh,” Caroline said, finally, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. “I haven’t done that since we got into Mum’s gin when I was fourteen. Is there a water bottle or –“

“I don’t know,” Abigail said, having checked and made sure Caroline hadn’t thrown up on any of the equipment. “In the glove box, maybe? Look, here’s a rag -”

There was still no answer, so she fumbled the back door open, adrenaline making her miss her grip on the handle the first time, and jumped out. She was just in time to run straight into somebody much taller than she was, and the spike of panic was almost simultaneous with the spike of pain as she fell backwards and landed hard on her tailbone.

“Where are you going?” Peter gave her a hand and pulled her up. “We need to get out of here.”

“You weren’t answering!” Abigail said.

“The electronics got blown out,” said Nightingale, who was heading for the driver’s door.

“What about that guy -”

“He’s dead.” Beverley poked her head in the door of the van; she was breathing like she’d been running, they all were. “Caroline, are you alright?”

“I’ve been better,” Caroline croaked, then coughed. “Yeah, I’ll be fine. Can we get out of here?”

The engine started as she said that; Abigail hastily climbed back in the van.

“Ten seconds to get out of the system,” she yelled, and clicked around frantically. One, two, disabled, done, out.

“All done?” Peter called back.

“Go,” Abigail said, and – at a speed much faster than Abigail was expecting – they went.

*

“He’s going to know we’ve been in,” Beverley said once they were back on the main road, with what Abigail recognized as tones of professional assessment, “as soon as he gets back. Everything was fine but after that idiot set off that - whatever the fuck that was –”

“A sort of mine,” Nightingale said. His face was very stern. “I’ve only come across one once before - unexploded ordnance, of its own kind, in Germany.”

“There wasn’t any explosion,” Peter said. “Just - whatever the fuck that was.”

“It’s magical,” said Nightingale.

“No shit,” said Abigail.

“I think Mum told me about something like that once,” Caroline mused, wiping her hands off. “But all she’d say was that they were dirty bloody things and we didn’t need to know about them.”

Peter gave her a quick sideways glance at _we,_ but said nothing; Abigail knew from looking her up that Caroline had six sisters not counting the short-term foster kids, so probably she meant them.

“They are,” said Nightingale. “During the War they were made by torturing people to death and…trapping their ghosts, more or less.”

Beverley shuddered. “That explains that. Wizards, ugh.”

“Made by who?” Peter asked, sharply.

“The Nazis,” said Nightingale, with some exasperation. Then he shrugged. “We were never desperate enough to try it, I suppose. I can’t say we would have never.”

“It doesn’t sound like the kind of thing you’d do except for fun _and_ profit,” Peter said. “So does that mean…”

“No,” said Nightingale. “That felt more like a dog. Or maybe a fox.”

Abigail sucked in a sharp breath. “That’s not much better!”

Beverley grimaced; she knew what Abigail meant, apparently. Peter, on the other side of the van, turned to her. “Not to endorse animal cruelty, but I didn’t know you were so interested in protecting foxes.”

“Well it wouldn’t be better anyway,” Abigail said, “but Caroline and me had a chat to one of the local foxes and Chorley’s definitely disappeared at least one. It’s worse with things that can talk, isn’t it? They’re people.”

“They’re foxes,” Caroline said, shifting in her seat; she was really too tall to enjoy long car rides, Abigail supposed. “Not people.”

“You had a chat to a fox,” Peter said carefully.

“I’ve been talking to foxes for years,” Abigail said. “One of  them tried to warn me about Lesley, I think, before everything went sideways, but you showed up and he ran off.”

“Great,” said Peter. “Fine. Talking foxes. We’re going to talk about that later. Getting back to the problem of Chorley knowing we were in there…Bev, you dropped the replacement key in exactly the same spot, right?”

“Of course,” said Beverley. “And I know Abigail looped the cameras –”

“Of course,” said Abigail. “Unless he’s not unexpected talents he’s not going to know I was in the system.”

“Nevertheless,” said Nightingale, “there’s a body and plenty of physical marks of intrusion for anybody who knows what they’re looking for. He’s got to know there was an attempt, at least.”

“It depends,” Beverley said, slowly. “On whether it gets connected to us at all, since that body isn’t any of ours, and on…” She twisted around to look at Peter. “Does Lesley know about what we really went in for?”

“Hang on,” said Caroline.

“Don’t worry, we’re still stealing books, and you want to know about your Mum, anyway,” Peter told her. “Yeah, she knew. Of course she did. That was the bait that got us on the job to start with.”

“Well, good,” said Beverley. “Because I found something. Or - it’s not good what I found, but I reckon they’ll think it’s what we were after. If they do think it’s us.”

Peter leaned forward, his seatbelt keeping him back. “And what you found was -”

Beverley tossed him a small plastic baggie; it floated through the air, light, and Abigail had to catch it. She took a good look before handing it to Peter. It was scraps of burned paper, and a few fragments of something darker and more leathery, as well as some twisted, melted plastic.

Peter stared at it for a long time.

“I hope he gave himself cancer, if he was burning these in his own bloody office,” he said finally. “Lots of plastic in passports these days.”

Abigail had a terrible, sinking feeling.

“You think those are the original identity documents,” said Nightingale. “The ones being used for blackmail.”

“Hard to tell how much there was,” Beverley said. “But we’ve identified, what is it, a few hundred victims, and that was a decent-size fireplace. He was burying the ashes in the garden, too, some of the leachates were starting to get into the local stream. So could be all of them.”

“I hope he also poisoned his bloody garden,” Peter said.

“I don’t,” said Beverley. “The garden didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But -” said Caroline. “Whose passports?”

“Nobody you know,” Peter said, leaning back into his seat, nothing but his fist tight around the bag of burnt scraps giving him away. “Just people trying to make a go of things, looking for decent jobs, who got told their documents were being taken to be scanned or assessed or whatever and never got them back, and then got told that if they didn’t want to be in trouble in a hostile environment they’d better do as they were told.”

“Oh,” said Caroline. “You could have said.”

“We didn’t like to complicate things.”

“I don’t mind doing a bit of a good deed as well as all the rest,” she said, sitting up to her full height. “Sure, Mum’s a viscountess - I was four when I came here and I came from Somalia, you think I don’t make sure I have all my papers in order, these days?”

Nightingale muttered something under his breath; it didn’t sound approving.

“Right,” Peter said. “Fair enough.”

“So,” said Beverley. “Probably Lesley and Chorley figure that’s what we were after, and we didn’t get it. But what are we going to do for them, if the documents are gone?”

“We’ll have to work on that one,” Peter said. His fist was still tight on the bag.

Beverley kissed her teeth. They drove down the M40 in silence.

*

Abigail had let down her guard enough about being followed – although she had asked Peter for tips on how to figure out if she _was_ being followed – that it was a nasty surprise when she left her parents’ flat on a cold, sunless morning and found Lesley May waiting for her in the carpark.

At first all she saw was a blonde white woman in jeans and a leather jacket of the kind Abigail vaguely wanted but had never felt quite cool enough to wear, and then she did an embarrassing double-take, and then it was too late to pretend she hadn’t seen her. So she put her chin up, and gave Lesley her best stare from across the carpark, channeling every bit she’d ever seen of Beverley and Caroline and Molly’s ability to walk through the world like they owned it. Then she angled between cars, so Lesley wouldn’t see her texting. It was the one reason she owned a classic Nokia clone phone and kept it on her; touch-typing just wasn’t reliable on a smartphone screen. She’d learned that trick in school. Only upside of not having enough money for a phone like everybody else had had.

She’d just finished typing out a quick heads-up to Peter – she wasn’t stupid enough to try and brazen this one out without calling in backup – when Lesley finished weaving her own way through the cars to stand in front of her. Abigail kept her hand in her jacket pocket. Taking it out would be more suspicious, and anyway she’d left her gloves behind and was now regretting it.

“Hi,” said Lesley.

“Excuse me,” said Abigail. “Do you mind?”

“Look –”

“No,” Abigail said. “I don’t think we’ve got anything to talk about.”

“If you’re mad about whatever happened on your little expedition to the country,” Lesley said, “that wasn’t my idea and you take what you get when you try to commit burglary.”

“I was thinking about how you tried to have Nightingale and Beverley blown up,” Abigail snapped back, “not to mention Peter.”

Lesley rolled her eyes. “Not my idea either, and Peter wasn’t – I don’t – I’ve never tried to hurt Peter. And you weren’t supposed to be there at all.” She frowned. “You’re still a kid, Peter should have known better.”

“You know what, I do have to ask. Is anything your idea? Or are you just happy doing what you’re told? Was it your idea to frame Peter and get him tossed out of the Met, or were you just too busy doing what you were told then, too?”

Lesley’s eyes darkened. “Peter can’t think I did that.”

“I dunno what Peter thinks, but I know about motive and opportunity.”

“You know about petty crime,” Lesley shot back. “It would have done you good to finally go down for something, show you some consequences.” She shook her head. “That’s not what I’m here for.”

“I’m going to miss my train if you keep talking,” said Abigail. “So hurry it up, whatever it is.”

“Fine.” Lesley sighed, as if much put-upon. She had her hands in her jacket pockets, too, and Abigail didn’t think it was a mobile phone she was keeping in reserve. Lesley had been getting closer as they talked; Abigail moved a careful step back.

“Listen,” Lesley went on. “All I have to say is – the books aren’t there, so leave it alone.”

“What?”

“My boss’s house,” Lesley said, patiently. “We know you’re still going after the books. They’re not there. That’d be pretty stupid, wouldn’t it, when there’s an insurance claim on them?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Abigail.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake. Cut it out. We know you were there, and you’re not going to get them. Cut your losses and consider yourselves lucky you’re not the subjects of a police inquiry.”

“I really have no idea what you’re talking about,” Abigail said again. “And I’ve probably missed my train now, so do you mind getting out of the way so I can get the next one?”

“Just tell Peter, okay?”

“Tell him yourself,” Abigail suggested, and shouldered past Lesley with her heart in her throat; Nightingale teaching her a couple of things had made her aware exactly how much she didn’t know about getting into physical fights.

Lesley shoved her back, not as hard as she could have, and didn’t say anything. Abigail kept walking, and kept walking, and it wasn’t until she rounded the corner of the building – and caught a glimpse of Lesley still standing where she’d left her out of the corner of her eye – that she felt some of the muscles in her shoulders relax.

She pulled the phone out of her pocket. “I hope you got some of that.”

“More or less,” Peter said. “Is she following you?”

Abigail looked behind her. People were starting to leave for school and there were kids in uniforms everywhere; she didn’t see Lesley.

“Don’t think so,” she said. “Are you at Molly’s? If you are, go boot up the tracking VM –” she gave him the technical details. “It’s the only one that should be giving a signal. Then you can let me know if she’s behind me.”

“Five quid says she knew you planted it.”

“Thanks for your confidence.”

“I don’t trust her anymore,” Peter said. “That doesn’t mean I don’t know how good she is. Take the long way around and I’ll let you know, okay?”

“Alright.”

“Bev says well done,” he added. “With the tracker.”

“Nice to be appreciated,” Abigail told him. “I’ll see you soon.”

*

The tracker data showed a path that went halfway to the nearest Tube station before it stopped in a rubbish bin, but it was in the opposite direction from where Abigail had gone when she’d left Peckwater Estate, so that was good enough.

“If she’d stuck it on somebody else it probably wouldn’t have gone in a bin,” Peter said. “Nice work.”

“Metadata,” said Abigail. “My favourite kind of data.”

“It doesn’t matter where it went, it matters that it went somewhere and then stopped?”

“Yep. Going into the Underground now.”

“Right-o.”

She was just out of cell reception range, through the turnstile, when she saw Sahra Guleed lurking - well, not really lurking, standing in the open with a red hijab visible at fifty paces - on the platform. Abigail immediately ducked behind a group of schoolkids, who were all at least her height and mostly taller, but it didn’t matter; Guleed came up to her a minute later.

“Hi,” she said. “Fancy seeing you here.”

“I live around here,” said Abigail. “Not much of a coincidence.”

“Not your usual station, this one.”

“You want something?”

“Just checking in,” she said. “You were there when I had that chat with Peter.”

“Yeah, and?” She’d been a bit slack on checking in on Guleed’s phone – too many other things to do – but there hadn’t been any evidence an investigation was being launched against Peter, or Nightingale or Beverley or Abigail or even Caroline, although that just meant there wasn’t one involving Guleed, or maybe that they were practicing really good old-fashioned data security. Handwritten notes only was the sort of thing that gave Abigail a cold sweat, professionally speaking. 

“Still waiting on that big, shiny excuse to have a chat to Martin Chorley,” Guleed said. “Any word on it?”

Abigail checked the board; two minutes until her train.

“Depends,” she said. “Might have something that's good enough for a warrant, but not if you want to find something. Yet.”

“Oh, I want to find a lot of things,” Guleed said, grimly.

“They’ve destroyed the original papers,” Abigail said, before she could stop herself. “Passports and all that.”

Guleed said something short and Coptic.

“We’ll keep you posted, okay?”

“Do that.”

By the time she got to Molly’s, Abigail was practically having full-blown paranoia.

“Is something wrong?” Nightingale said, when he opened the door to her. “Did Lesley -”

“No, but Peter’s old mate Guleed had me up at the Tube station,” Abigail said. “It’s been a morning and it’s practically still before breakfast.”

“Only if you’re keeping weekend hours,” said Peter from behind Nightingale, with mild disapproval.

“Hacking works better at three am,” said Abigail. “It’s one of those things.”

“What did Sahra want, anyway?” Peter asked, as Nightingale stepped aside to let her in. “I can offer coffee in exchange for information.”

“I’ll take tea,” Abigail told them, “but what you really need to know is, she’s getting impatient.”

*

“Are you absolutely sure you don’t want to use a harness,” Peter said, for what had to be the tenth time. “Yes,” said Beverley. “It’s going to be way easier deactivating the pressure sensors without it. I know you don’t really believe it can happen -”

“It’s not a question of not believing,” said Peter. “I’m capable of accepting things I’ve actually seen, even if they'd sound totally crazy if I hadn’t seen them. Empirical evidence trumps everything. What it’s a question of is what happens if someone gets distracted and you fall to your death.”

“You know, I’m not totally sure that’d kill me,” Beverley said, way too thoughtfully.

“Someone has to think about health and safety.”

Caroline actually laughed at that. “Do you think OSH are going to come and tell us off if we do it wrong or something?”

“Taking safety precautions really isn’t a matter of whether anybody is going to reprimand you for not doing so,” said Nightingale. “It’s a matter of, as Peter puts it, not falling to one’s death. However, I don’t believe that’s a major concern.”

“Okay, here’s what is a major concern,” said Abigail. “If you and Caroline are up on that roof doing magic, then what’s going to happen to the security system? Do you know how long you can do it before it burns out? Because that’s definitely going to attract attention. You might as well do a smash-and-grab.”

Nightingale frowned. “Now you put it that way –”

“We could do a test run.” Peter leant back in his chair and laced his hands behind his head. “The trouble is where to get a comparable system.”

“There isn’t one,” said Abigail. “Not in London, anyway. Or at least not civilian and that’s a totally different thing.”

Beverley sighed. “Fine, and it’d take out the cameras too, wouldn’t it?”

“And any chance I had of keeping an eye on things,” agreed Abigail. “So can we do it the boring Mission Impossible way?”

“Come on, the Mission Impossible way is still pretty neat,” said Caroline.

“Well, we don’t have time anyway,” Peter said. “Three days.”

“I think we should move it up to tomorrow night,” said Nightingale. “Things are moving too fast.”

Peter frowned. “You…might have a point.”

“Doesn’t make a difference to me,” said Caroline.

“It does to me,” Abigail argued. “I could maybe get finished if I don’t sleep before then–”

“Are you saying you absolutely can’t?” Peter asked.

“I’m saying it’ll be a real rush,” Abigail said. “Of course I _can_.”

“Good,” said Beverley, who was checking her phone. “Now you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got gear to check.”

“I take what I said earlier back, I might be worried,” said Caroline, looking at the list Abigail had printed off. “This is a lot to do by tomorrow evening. They have to be really good copies, too, they’ll be looking for fakes.”

“I did say.”

“If it’s not tomorrow it would have to be the week after,” said Nightingale, “and I really don’t think we want to leave loose ends dangling that long.”

“We could look after ourselves.” Caroline turned a page over. “Good thing we’ve got a whole lab in this building.”

“We’ll all help,” Peter said. “It’ll get done.”

“It’s not us, so much,” Nightingale said, surprisingly. “Chorley – and all his associates – are putting people in real harm and danger, and the longer this drags out, the longer that goes on.” He nodded at Peter. “There have, after all, been bodies.”

“I’m hoping we can give them names, when all this is done,” Peter said. “That’d be good.”

“You know,” said Abigail to Peter, “you totally swore to me that him,” she nodded at Nightingale, “and Bev were totally in this for the money, or the fun, or something like that.”

“Did I?” Peter shrugged. “It sounded like the thing you needed to hear at the time.”

“Well, money’s always nice to have,” said Caroline. “But names matter.” She flipped the list back to the front page and put it down. “I’ve got some paper in my car. Let’s get started.”

*

Abigail swore to herself, sitting cross-legged on the back floor of the nondescript Ford Transit van, that the next time she did a job that meant she had to leave the house she was going to make whoever it was – say Peter, even though it wasn’t like she expected him to commission her for crime again after this – anyway, Peter or whoever, she was going to demand they put a proper seat in the back for her to sit in while she did surveillance. This was just uncomfortable.

“All good out here,” said Peter, who was covering the main entrance. “Caroline, how are you doing with the security?”

“I’ve got an eye on them,” said Caroline. “If it looks like they’re going to be a problem there’s a couple of options. Drunk socialite for starters. Coming your way in two minutes, by the way.”

“Yeah, that’s on the pattern.”

“We’re almost done with the drilling,” said Nightingale; there’d been a steady low-pitched whine from his and Beverley’s earpieces but Peter had asked them not to switch them off. It went on a second longer, then stopped. Abigail put her earpiece back in her ear and started typing with two hands again, instead of using one to hold her earpiece where the whining was at a bearable level. She wasn’t actually doing anything job-related, just catching up with a couple of subreddits and telling some idiots who thought scripts were cheating where they could stick them, but she'd be ready when the time came.

“Alright,” said Peter. “Beverley, are you ready to go?”

“Yes, and we checked the harness three times,” Beverley said. “Alright – here we go!”

There was a rushing sound, like wind, and Nightingale said “Er – yes, she’s on her way in.”

“Did you _jump_?” Peter said.

“Nice,” said Caroline.

“Shhh, motion sensors,” said Beverley. “Working.”

The lights weren’t on in the warehouse and Abigail could only see Beverley through one of the cameras because she’d switched on her headlamp. The motion sensors were inconveniently not lit up like beams of light like they were in the movies, but as Abigail watched Beverley made some indistinct tossing motions and they came into view as flour fell gently through the air.

There wasn’t any reason Beverley would make sparks, but Abigail crossed her fingers anyway. Flour blew up almost like old-school black powder; she’d seen some videos on YouTube.

They’d got the right point in the middle of the warehouse, and Beverley only had to arch and swing around one of the motion sensor beams, catching herself on the floor with her toe to stop the swing back through it. Abigail held her breath, but everything stayed calm. She’d see it if an alert went out, but that wouldn’t be any help for Beverley.

“On the ground,” Beverley reported.

“Check,” said Nightingale, very seriously. “Don’t forget to tie down the cable.”

“What do you think I’m doing?” she retorted.

It was five minutes before Beverley was ready to try opening the crates and each one oozed past for Abigail like a Friday afternoon class at school.

“Okay, I’ve run the password. Putting in the two-factor code now,” Beverley reported. Her earpiece was good enough, things like drilling aside, that Abigail couldn’t actually hear any tapping. The nearest camera was far enough away she couldn’t see it either, but her brain filled it in anyway. Brains were stupid that way.

That meant she also didn’t hear what she knew must have been a negatory _beep_ from the crate.

“Shit,” Beverley said. “It didn’t work.”

“What?” Peter said sharply. “Okay. Give it thirty seconds, try again.”

“Oh, fuck -” Abigail clicked through screens. “It’s sent out a warning. Someone’s going to be coming in to investigate. You’ve got to move.”

“I see them,” Caroline reported. “Security, two of them. They’re looking at their phones, heading for the door -”

“Hold them off,” Peter ordered. “Make a fuss, have a fainting fit, whatever it takes.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job!” Caroline shot back, and there were some muffled sounds.

“I can get down there if you need help,” Nightingale said. “Say the word.”

“Trying again,” Beverley said, as cool as if she was sitting at Molly’s place showing Abigail how to pick locks; Abigail could feel sweat breaking out on the back of her own neck. There was an agonizing pause. “Alright; I’m in. I think I typed the first one wrong.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Peter said, although he’d definitely muttered something under his breath. “Caroline’s got them with her for now. Keep going.”

“Lowering the replacements,” Nightingale reported.

“Remember, you’ve got to keep the weight the same,” Abigail reminded Beverley.

“Don’t tell me how to do _my_ job,” Beverley said, the only evidence of the work she was doing the sound of her breathing getting faster. “Are we sure we need all of these?”

“The valuable ones,” said Peter. “And the ones on the lists. Enough to make it look good.”

“They’re all valuable, or they wouldn’t be here,” pointed out Nightingale.

“You know what I mean,” said Peter. “Okay – Caroline’s been packed off. You need to move now.”

“Right.” Thirty more seconds ticked by. The security guards stopped in the lobby to chat to the third, who was watching the cameras – or what he thought were the cameras, anyway. Actually most of them were; Abigail had only redirected the feeds of the ones inside the warehouse. No need to get fancy.

“Ready to bring the first lot up?” Beverley still didn’t sound rushed. Abigail snatched her hand away from her mouth before she chewed her thumbnail ragged again.

“Bringing them up,” Nightingale said. Abigail watched the plastic pallet loaded with books ascending, tried not to mentally recalculate the load-bearing maximum of the high-strength cord they were using, and kept the other eye on the lobby. The guards were staring at screens and shaking their heads, but eventually one sighed and got to his feet again. The pallet was whirring back down, Beverley climbing to guide it around the motion sensors.

“You’ve got about a minute,” Abigail said.

“Can you do me and the books at the same time?” Beverley wanted to know. She was dusting off the crate and hooking herself back onto the rope.

“Thirty seconds,” Abigail said.

“I think –” Nightingale said, and then there was a very short noise that might have been a startled breath and Caroline stage-whispering “Aaaaaaah, shit, it’s me, don’t!”

“Are you…on the roof?” Peter wanted to know.

“It sounded like it was the best place!”

“How did you -”

“Ten seconds!” Abigail interrupted.

“On my count,” Nightingale said in clipped tones, and Beverley and the books both started rising, Beverley clipping herself up the rope faster than it was being hauled in.

“Five seconds,” Abigail said, giving up on not biting her nails, and then the internal door to the warehouse swung open in the top right feed.

“On the roof!” Beverley said.

“Okay, we’re bringing the van around,” Peter said, which was all the warning Abigail got before he climbed in. “Everything OK back there?”

“They haven’t spotted anything yet,” Abigail said. “I don’t think.”

Her heart didn’t start to slow down until the back doors of the van opened and the other three slid in two very heavy pallets, and climbed in. Beverley went around the front and got in the passenger seat.

“Alright,” said Peter, starting up; silent electric vehicles were so good for being sneaky, Abigail though approvingly. “Let’s get out of here.”

*

Abigail hadn’t got anywhere near the books last time. They had their own distinctive smell, not musty but specifically old-book-ish, paper and ink and time. It reminded her of the time she’d gone to interview Elsie Winstanley with Aunt Mamusu for a school project and she’d shown them some of the British Library stacks.

She and Caroline both had lists and they worked quickly, checking to see they had what they were supposed to get. Caroline murmured curiously as they worked. Abigail couldn’t read Latin or German, which were the ones she murmured over most, and there wasn’t anything that her one year of French was good for. And of course nothing in Fula, which was the only other human language she understood really well. Computer languages were a different story, of course.

The room they were working in had been a library, once - the shelves were there, and the tables and chairs for people reading and working, but they were empty except for the odd book which was obviously worthless, and a complete set of the Encyclopedia Brittanica from 1913. It felt right to have books spread out across every available surface, and wrong, in a way, to be taking them away again. Except for one or two that Nightingale was determined they should keep.

“You don’t learn magic from books, not really,” Caroline had said. “I know you know that.”

“Let’s say I’m curious about what they did learn from books,” he’d replied. “Back in the old days.”

The ones they were keeping were mostly in Latin. Abigail resolved, privately, that she needed to learn it.

“So are these, like,” Abigail asked Caroline as they worked, “magic books?”

“They’re books _about_ magic,” said Caroline. “Some of them anyway. I’ve never heard of a book that was magic itself, at least not in the UK.”

“I can think of one,” Nightingale said unexpectedly, “but it wasn’t of local provenance and Dr Winstanley has it locked safely away for now. Perhaps she’d show it to you if you asked.”

“She’s going to owe us after this,” Caroline said, taking another careful photograph - the lighting had to be good enough to capture all the details.

“It goes both ways,” said Abigail. “She’s fencing some of them too.”

“How are we going?” Peter asked, coming in with another load of clear plastic boxes and the sheeting that would go between each layer. Beverley was following with what had to be the last of them.

“Almost sorted,” Abigail told him.

“Alright. Let’s get them packed and then…” Peter frowned at her. “Are you sure about this?”

“No,” said Abigail. “What about if I just hacked his car? It might work.” She shook her head. “Never mind, we both know this is the best plan we could think of.”

“I think you’re mad, but it’s not up to me,” said Caroline.

“I think I’ll be right there,” said Beverley. “So it’ll be fine.”

“Because I could do it.” Peter pulled out a chair to put the boxes on. “Actually, I should do it. I’ve been thinking.”

“They won’t believe you,” Nightingale said. “Whereas Abigail is plausible.”

Peter looked her in the eye. “Are you sure, then?”

“Yes,” said Abigail, ignoring the way her stomach turned over, because - it was the best plan. “When do you want me to make the call?”

Peter looked around. “We're not ready to go yet.”

“The fakes aren’t nearly ready, either.” Caroline took another photo. “And we need those.”

“Don’t call them that,” said Beverley. “They’re…replacements.”

“Replacements. Yeah.” Peter nodded. “Then let’s pack. With our gloves on.”

“They’re not that fragile,” said Nightingale. “And they won’t take fingerprints well at all.”

“They’re antiques.” Peter tossed him a box of disposable gloves; Abigail wiggled her fingers in hers, which were getting sweaty. “And they could take fingerprints - you’re way too cavalier about forensics, you know. We almost got you on that at least twice.”

“But you didn’t.” Beverley put her own on professionally fast.

“But I didn’t,” agreed Peter. “So here we are.”

A couple of hours later, Abigail walked out of Molly’s house, through Russell Square, and down Southampton Row as far as Holborn, just in case _she_ was being tracked. Then she made a call.

Lesley picked up gratifyingly fast, all things considered.

“Abigail!” She sounded genuinely pleased, but it flattened into suspicion almost immediately. “This is a surprise.”

Abigail took a breath and tried to remember everything Caroline had told her - when to hesitate, how fast to talk, what not to say.

“I – yeah, I didn’t think I’d call you either but - I need to talk to you. And…” Her hand tightened on the phone. “And your boss.”

*

Abigail met them on the Victoria Embankment as the sun was going down and the wind was getting rapidly colder. The Thames was flowing sluggishly past, in reality deeper and faster and more dangerous than it looked from here; she caught a glimpse of a dark shape that vanished below the surface. It could have been a seal. They came all the way up to Twickenham sometimes. There was a website where you could post photos if you saw them and everything. Most of the photos probably _were_ seals, even.

Peter was two hundred meters away in a car that belonged to one of Bev’s sisters (“just so we’re clear, she’ll drown you if it comes back dented and I won’t do anything to stop her”) and barely in line of sight. Abigail didn’t look in that direction, but was trying not to look like she wasn’t looking in it. It was a total white elephant problem.

“I’ve got eyes on you and them,” he said in her earpiece, like he knew what she was thinking. “Good luck.”

Lesley gave her a very keen look as Abigail walked up; Chorley, who Abigail barely recognized, glanced at her only briefly, the look of someone who had nothing to be worried about.

“What?” Abigail said to Lesley, figuring that some aggressiveness was probably expected and also, fuck Lesley, she was the actual worst. “You want to, like, search me or something?”

“Should I?” Lesley eyed her. “I suppose you’d probably know where to get a gun.”

Abigail had precisely one idea about where she might get a gun and it was “ask Nightingale, because he used to be in the military”, but somehow she didn’t think that was what Lesley meant. Chorley, however, chuckled.

“I don’t think this young lady is the type, do you, Lesley?”

It was indulgent, but Abigail knew that sort of indulgence; it was the sort that dismissed you because you weren’t worth anything.

“I’m really not,” she said anyway. “I’m good with, you know, computers and stuff, not…” She waved a hand. “This has all got way, way out of hand, hasn’t it? I just wanted - I was going to go to uni next year and the fees went up again and…” She shoved the hand back in her pocket. “I couldn’t hear properly for a week after the warehouse blew up. I could’ve been killed.”

“It sounds like you’re being very sensible,” said Chorley. Everything he said made the back of Abigail’s neck itch.

“I just,” she said. “I just don’t want to get in trouble, and I think you’re probably good at making trouble go away. If - there’s some things I could tell you -”

“I could be.” Chorley looked at her critically. “If there’s something worth keeping you out of trouble for. I know your sort - you’d probably be in it again a week later.”

“You don’t have the books.” Lesley said. “What else could you have?”

Abigail clenched her fists in her pocket. “I think you didn’t realise, when I was undercover - I wasn’t mucking around. Like I said, I’m good with computers. I’m really good, actually. And the security there was a joke once you had any sort of user access, so -”

“That’s good, keep going,” Peter was saying in her earpiece.

Lesley and Chorley exchanged a look and Chorley waved a hand, with just a tiny smirk that said it was for theatrical purposes, and Peter’s voice cut out. Abigail couldn’t say for sure, but she was willing to bet the chips in the phone in her pocket had just crumbled into sand.

Oh, shit.

Lesley stepped towards her too quickly for Abigail to get out of the way, and fished the phone out like she’d known exactly where it was all along.

“I’m willing to listen,” Chorley said, “but let’s just make sure it’s only you we’re talking to.”

Abigail licked her lips and tried to think what to say next. Keep them there for twenty minutes, that had been the brief, and it had been maybe ten at best. She could spin a story, she could. She was just painfully aware of what Chorley might be capable of, and that she was standing here without so much as a payphone in sight, it was her and the city and the river and people who didn’t seem to have any conscience at all and she’d meant everything she’d said, in a weird sort of way; she’d only intended to do a well-paid job and keep going. She’d never meant to end up here.

“Do you see anybody else?” she finally managed to retort. “I’m what you’ve got. And like I was saying, I got way more than the information about your books out of Finlayson Amberley, I bet you didn’t know –” Then she focused over Chorley’s shoulder and just about sagged, totally against her will, with relief.

“Oh, come on,” said Lesley. “Like we’re going to fall for that. And like you could get fifteen metres.”

“Excuse me,” said Peter, who was supposed to be in the car. “Abigail, are these people bothering you?”

“What the hell,” said Abigail. “You’re not supposed to be here!”

Chorley swung around but Lesley kept her eyes on Abigail - not that she was going to use the escape route but could Lesley be a _little_ less paranoid?

“No,” Chorley said to Peter. “You’re not supposed to be here.” Abigail tried to take a step in their direction, but Lesley blocked her, reaching for something inside her leather jacket. Abigail shuffled towards the river wall instead.

“So why don’t you just take a jump?” Chorley said to Peter, very pleasantly, but with something behind it that Abigail didn’t quite recognize but dreaded all the same. Twelve minutes. Twelve minutes and they needed the head-start of twenty, just in case, because she was here and not monitoring -

“Oh,” said Peter. “Yeah. Right. Sorry to bother you.”

He walked past Chorley, shaking his head, and his face had a slightly puzzled look that was totally wrong. Then he turned towards the river and Abigail said “No –” and Chorley laughed and Lesley drew in a sharp breath but didn’t say anything, and Abigail was still caught on that when Peter tackled her over the edge of the railing. The last thing she heard was Chorley’s laughter turning to outrage, and then she hit the water.

*

The next breath Abigail got was about half a kilometer downstream, and still in the middle of the river; she gasped and took in some water as well as air and choked and flailed, until a firm hand grasped the back of her puff jacket - now heavy with water - and towed until her feet hit gravel and sand. She stepped gingerly, because even half-drowning she knew the sort of crap that ended up at the bottom of the Thames, but it was enough.

Peter was coughing, too. Beverley, who was somehow standing even though she was back where the water was deep, threw up her arms; it splashed both of them with freezing water.

“For fuck’s sake!” She said. “Are you mad? It was only supposed to be Abigail, if things went wrong!”

“Things did go wrong!” Peter said, still coughing. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“I had it under control!” Abigail said defensively. “We knew they might break my phone, that was why there was a backup plan.”

“Well, yeah,” said Peter. “I changed my mind. And then he tried to mind-control me or whatever, so then things were definitely going wrong. I improvised.”

Beverley sniffed at him – actually sniffed – and glowered. “He did. Are we _sure_ I just shouldn’t –”

“Well, if everything’s gone according to plan out in the countryside,” said Peter, “you won’t need to. Promise.”

“Wait,” Abigail said. “You did that because you were being mind-controlled?”

“No. I did that because he wanted me to jump, by myself, so I figured I’d take you with me and waste their time trying to figure out if you were going to resurface or pretending to call for help.” Peter checked his – waterproof, apparently – watch. “We should be good now.”

Beverley touched a pocket of her wetsuit. “I just got a text. I think we are.”

“Then can we get out of the water?” Abigail was starting to shiver and trying not to remember hypothermia statistics. People were watching them from the bank, too.

“Come on,” Beverley sighed.

Out of the water, Beverley poked at Abigail’s sodden jacket, and wiped her hand down the sleeve. Water came with it, running away in trickles and rivulets and finally streams, wetting the pavement in every direction.

“Hey, wait -” Peter looked around him. “How -”

“It doesn’t matter how,” Beverley said. “Just enjoy the effects.”

Abigail frowned because it absolutely did matter how, it was magic, but Peter didn’t push it; he just held out his hand. “Can I borrow your phone?”

“Maybe,” Beverley said. “What for?”

“You got the message?”

“Yep. So what for? We’re done, aren’t we? Thomas and Caroline called in ten minutes ago. They're on their way back.”

“One more thing,” Peter said, grinning now, despite the fact he must be as cold as Abigail was. “I need to message Sahra. Show me how to do it off-the-record again?”

Abigail began to grin back. “You’re so useless. Hand that over.”

*

The next day – drier and not quite as full of adrenaline – Abigail saw an alert she had set up on her phone flash. She double-checked it was the one she thought it was – it was really easy to get over-excited when things were happening – and started legging it for her set-up above the garage.

“Abigail, what-“ Peter called, but she was out of earshot and didn’t catch the rest. She barreled across the courtyard, up the stairs, and slid into her chair just in time to bring up a glorious full colour picture of two uniformed police officers with gloves on going through a pile of books in Martin Chorley’s study, right where Beverley, Caroline, and Nightingale had left them.

She found herself in the peculiar position of regretting that Chorley hadn’t actually been creepy enough to install microphones as well as cameras, but she didn’t need sound to figure out what the squat brown-haired detective was saying to the uniformed officers. Then Sahra Guleed walked in through the far door. Neither of them got obviously excited, but there was a smile curling around Sahra’s lips that you could only call satisfied.

Peter banged in the door. “What is it, did –”

“You reckon this is flashy enough for her?” Abigail said, turning to him. “Someone just found the books at Chorley’s.”

“You mean most of the books,” Peter said, exactly the same smile beginning to creep onto his face. “Is it – oh, fantastic, the – Stephanopoulos is there as well.”

“I don’t see why this is so good, still.”

“Insurance fraud is a big no-no if you’re busy sitting on company boards,” said Peter, perching on the back of a dustcover-clad couch. “Triggers all sorts of investigations and inquiries. I mean, if it's enough insurance fraud then it’s a company’s problem and you’ll get away with it, but this is petty and personal and really, really hard to prove he didn’t do.”

“He did do it,” said Abigail, making sure she was recording and then clicking away from the feed; it was just people going through books, nothing new.

“Really not the same thing as being unable to create reasonable doubt you didn’t do it,” said Peter. “There must be about fifty things I know Beverley and Nightingale have done that nobody could prove to the satisfaction of a jury, which is why we never bothered trying. Same goes for you, actually, except as far as I know nobody even knows they should be looking for you.”

“Good, ‘cause they’re not meant to.”

There was the muffled buzzing of a phone on vibrate; Abigail thought it was hers for a second but it was Peter. He pulled it out, raised his eyebrows, and hit something on the screen. “Hello, Sahra. What’s the occasion?”

“You told me once you had no idea where Martin Chorley’s books were,” came Sahra Guleed’s voice – he’d gone on speakerphone. Abigail tried not to breathe loudly. “Would you care to tell me that again?”

“Absolutely,” Peter said, immediate and straight-faced. “Why, did you find them somewhere weird?”

“We found them at his house.”

Abigail opened the feed. Sahra had left the study, so it took a few seconds to find her standing in the kitchen, phone to her ear.

“That’s slack,” said Peter. “If you’re going to commit insurance fraud you might as well be smart about it.”

“What makes you think it’s insurance fraud?”

“He reported something valuable stolen that was still in his possession – what else was it going to be?”

“Mmmmhmmm.” On screen, she looked up, right at the camera – but only for a fraction of a second, then she was staring out the window. “You’re right. It’s very stupid.”

“Everybody screws up somewhere,” said Peter. “Otherwise you’d never get to arrest anybody.”

“I don’t think Martin Chorley is very stupid,” said Sahra. “I think he’s very smart, and his lawyers are going to be a fucking pain. I think he also has an ex-policewoman working for him, and I _know_ Lesley's smart. So I’m curious exactly why they screwed up this way.”

“I stopped working on that case months ago,” Peter said. “I’m not the best person to ask, not even close.”

"And Lesley?"

"Made some bad choices, apparently," he said, lightly enough. Abigail pretended not to notice the way his jaw went stiff.

“You are a fucking pain is what you are,” Sahra said, but with some affection. "Don't think you're not."

“I’m moving on,” said Peter, which was the biggest lie he’d told in this entire conversation. “I hear it’s psychologically healthy and all that.”

“Okay, then.” They said brief goodbyes, and Peter hung up.

The tiny Sahra on Abigail’s computer screen looked up at the camera again, nodded once, and walked out of the kitchen.

“She knows we did that,” said Abigail. “You told her where they were.”

“She can’t prove we did that,” said Peter. “Or that I told her. And most importantly, she doesn’t want to.”

“How long do you reckon it’s going to take to figure out what we kept?” Abigail asked. They were starting to pack the books into boxes now.

“A few weeks,” said Peter. “And then they’ll ask Chorley where they hid them, because obviously he hid them, and he’ll say it wasn’t him - hell, maybe he'll try to pin it on Lesley - and that will be entirely unbelievable and I expect Stephanopoulos will laugh in his face and, tell you the truth, I’ve never regretted being kicked off the force more than when I picture that and know I won’t be there to see it.”

“Want me to hack the cameras at the station?” Abigail offered.

“Nah,” Peter said, but he thought about it for a second, Abigail could tell. “Save that for if we actually need it.”

Need it for what, Abigail wondered, but she decided not to ask today.

*

The books, though, weren’t the point of the thing; there was still something to take care of.

“This is…a lot more than I was expecting,” Caroline said, when the last passport was finally bagged along with its corresponding – entirely faked – immigration documents. “How many people, again?”

“Four hundred and seventy two,” Peter said. “Right now. Some of them aren’t in the country any more – they got deported, mostly. This is everybody who’s still here, everybody we can help.”

“I know Chorley’s going to be a bit busy with the fraud charges…” said Beverley.

“Insurance companies are way nastier than the Met.” Peter shook his head. “They’re big on…what’s that French saying?”

“Pour encourager les autres,” said Nightingale. “Or you could just say setting an example.”

“Yeah, and Lesley was his in at the Met,” Beverley went on, “but how sure are we these are going to be what people need? I know they’re very _good_ fakes –”

“I don’t even think of them as fakes, really,” said Caroline. “They’re just replacements for lost property.”

“You know how they chose who to blackmail?” Abigail said.

“Threw darts at a board?”

“They had lists. Government ones - people who were being investigated, people whose visas were about to expire, the people they were supposed to be helping hunt down…but anyway, the point is, all these people? They’re not on those lists anymore.”

“You said once you didn’t like doing government systems,” said Beverley. “Isn’t hacking Customs, like, the definition of that?”

“It was the only thing that was going to make it work.”

Abigail shrugged, and tried to look like it hadn’t been a big deal, even though she’d woken up in a cold sweat twice in the last week thinking about whether she might have been traced. There was stuff you had to do, sometimes.

Apparently Beverley got that, because she just nodded.

“Well,” said Nightingale. “Now there’s just distribution.”

“Covered,” Peter said firmly. “We’re not going to drive around London – not to mention all the other places – handing these out.”

“I was hoping not.” Nightingale gave Peter an inquiring look, but Peter didn’t say anything else. Abigail figured it was one of those things where he knew someone. Peter knew lots of people.

The next morning, when he shanghaied her to help him carry heavy boxes up the stairs to his parents’ because the lift was out, she came to a horrified realisation.

“You’re not – oh my god,” she said. “She’s going to kill you.”

“It was the only thing that was going to work,” Peter said. “Plus I think Elsie Winstanley already told her half of it.”

“She’s going to kill _me_ – no, worse, she’s going to talk to my parents.”

“Nah,” Peter said, but he didn’t sound nearly as confident as Abigail wanted him to. “She knows better.”

“Is this all of them?” his mother said, opening the door. “I thought it would be more. No need to worry about your father, he’s out.”

“One more box,” Peter said. “Abigail’s going to run down and get it.”

Abigail was highly temped to give him the finger but Aunt Mamusu would definitely have something to say about that, so she didn’t. Also, it kept her away from the chopping block for longer.

When she came back up, there were bags spread out over the kitchen table, being shuffled into some order that Abigail couldn’t place – not by country or alphabet.

“Over there,” Aunt Mamusu was saying to Peter. “She lives in Bromley.” She nodded to Abigail. “Put that down there. Did you help Peter steal these?”

Abigail froze.

“That’s a yes, then.” She kissed her teeth. “He shouldn’t have asked you. You’re too young.”

“He didn’t,” Abigail said, after a glance at Peter, who looked resigned but not surprised. “I volunteered. It was…important.”

“You’re a good child,” said her aunt.

“They were stolen from the people they belong to,” Peter said, apparently having successfully avoided the part about how they - and Caroline and Nightingale and Beverley - had forged them rather than stealing them, exactly. “We’re just giving them back. That’s all.”

“This is the sort of thing the police should do,” Aunt Mamusu mused, a frown on her face.

“They couldn’t,” Peter said, quietly. “Or they wouldn’t, or – anyway. We did it. Just – best for everybody if they go back quietly, yeah?”

“Of course,” said his mother. “None of these people trust anybody from the authorities, not these days.”

“I know.” Peter didn’t sound happy about it, which was a laugh, it wasn’t like he trusted people.

“And you got Elsie’s books back,” Aunt Mamusu went on. “You’re doing a lot of good deeds in all this spare time you have, aren’t you?”

“We sort of got paid for that,” said Abigail. “It was a job.”

Aunt Mamusu nodded approvingly. “I hope it paid well. You’re supposed to be saving for university next year. How’s that going?”

“Good,” Abigail said. “I can – we can afford it, I think.”

“You need to go.” She poked Peter in the arm. “Not like this one, who could have and didn’t.”

“We’re a bit past that now, don’t you think, Mum?”

“You could still go back as an adult student,” she said. “It’s not like you’re a police officer anymore.”

“I’ll have to think about it,” Peter hedged.

“And your friends. Did they help with this?”

“Er,” said Peter. “Which friends?”

“The ones Sahra told me about,” said his mother, which put a real look of alarm onto Peter’s face. “If they are your friends, because she didn’t seem to be sure.”

“Bev and Thomas?” Peter said. “Are, um, definitely friends. Ask Elsie, if you like.”

“I have,” she said. “You should bring them for dinner. Next week.”

Peter looked even more alarmed. “Uh –”

“Wednesday,” his mother said firmly. “Unless you’re too busy with your schedule of –”

“Yes, mum,” he said quickly. “I’ll ask.”

“Good. And you,” she said to Abigail, “need to tell your parents that you’re moving out. You are moving out to a flat, aren’t you? It’s not a boy? Or a girl.” She said the last bit very dubiously, but she did say it, which was something.

“A friend’s offered me a room,” Abigail said. “Really cheap, she’s got loads more space than she needs and she likes computers too. But not a friend like - just a normal friend.”

Now, Abigail saw with sudden clarity, she was going to end up introducing Aunt Mamusu to Molly and that was either going to end well or really terribly. She blamed Peter for everything.

“Oh, well,” said Aunt Mamusu. “You’re young enough anyway. But I wouldn’t worry about your father. I think he’ll be quite pleased you’re getting some independence.”

“Oh,” said Abigail. “Um. Great.”

“Just,” she went on. “If you’re going to do this sort of thing.” She gestured at all the passports. “You better have a good plan for not getting caught.”

“Yes,” Abigail said after a pause. “Definitely.”

*

“So are you going to university next year?” Beverley asked Abigail the next day. “Because I heard Peter’s mum reckons you are.”

“You reckon I should?”

“I did,” Beverley said. “And then I thought, nah, you’re too good this already, what do you need a degree for?” She made a face. “Don’t ever let my mum know I told you that.”

“If I’m ever in the same room as your mum I’ve probably done something wrong,” said Abigail, who was sure that _most_ of the stories she’d heard about the Goddess of the River Thames were crap, because she knew Bev now, but, like…not _all_ of them. “And no. Not going. I thought I should too but - you’re right. I _am_ good.”

“Ugh, don’t talk to me about mothers,” said Caroline. They were waiting in the lecture theatre that wasn’t for Peter, who’d said he wanted a debrief - well, he hadn’t said it, but he'd obviously meant it - but was running late. “I told Mum she was off the hook and was she grateful? I think not.”

“Did we establish the extent of your mother’s involvement with Finlayson Amberley?” Nightingale asked, not hesitantly because he didn’t do that but – almost.

Caroline looked to Abigail, who shrugged; she didn’t have much. “Money, definitely, so, like…proceeds of crime, but she was an investor, I don’t think everybody with money in it knew what they were doing.”

Caroline shrugged, too, flicking her hair – long expensive extensions today – over her shoulder. “There you go. Mum’s not – she’s a total hippie, but she doesn’t like people being exploited. I don’t think she knew.” She grimaced. “I think if she did she would have been nicer about it, but it’s all going to come out in the wash eventually.” She changed the topic. “Do you have a mother, Thomas? I don’t see it, I feel like you sprang full-grown out of somewhere.”

“Of course he does, I’ve met her,” said Beverley, which was a real surprise. “She’s very nice.”

Caroline looked supremely unconvinced.

“Sorry,” Peter said, finally making an appearance. “I got held up by Sahra. Nothing to worry about, she just wanted to hassle me in person.” 

“Hmmm,” said Nightingale.

“She knows what she knows but she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know,” Peter said. “And she owes us one, and she knows that, even if she doesn’t like it. Hey, Abigail - all moved in yet?”

“Saturday,” Abigail said. “I need your car.”

“Can’t your borrow your Dad’s?”

“Then I’d have to show him where I’m moving,” Abigail said. “I was gonna work up to that.”

“Fair,” said Peter. “I won’t even make you ask nicely.”

“Where are you moving?” Caroline wanted to know.

“Here,” said Abigail. “Just…for a bit, maybe, it’s not like there isn’t space. I’m gonna fix some stuff up for Molly.”

“Huh.” Caroline looked around, as if assessing the building. “You reckon she’d let me stay here too? For a bit.”

“Your mum was that mad?” asked Beverley.

“No, but I’ve been thinking about moving out for ages and I think I’m just going to have to…do it,” Caroline said.

“Anybody else?” Peter said, dryly.

“No,” Beverley said, “but you should probably put your notice in on your flat – when’s the last time you checked your mail?”

“Yesterday,” Peter said, “because I still live there. Technically.”

Nightingale covered his mouth with his hand and looked away. Beverley just blinked at Peter like he’d said something obviously stupid.

“I suppose it’s good for you to have another address,” she conceded.

“I didn’t say I was going to start staying there again,” said Peter. “Also, before I forget, you two, dinner, my parents’ place, Wednesday. Mum insists.”

“Oh, god,” said Beverley.

“No, she’s totally normal,” said Peter.

“It’ll be easier if you go quietly,” said Abigail. Nightingale had the good sense to look as alarmed as Beverley did.

“Enough about all our mums.” Peter leaned back on the lowest row of desks. “We need to make sure we’ve tidied up all the loose ends, and then…we’re done.”

“We all know what we’re doing,” said Caroline. “But before we’re done, done – can I make a suggestion?”

“Sure?”

“After I was done arguing with Mum, I got a phone call from an old friend – someone I knew from flight school.”

“You went to flight school?” Beverley’s eyebrows went up.

“I told you she did,” said Abigail – it had been practically the first record she’d found.

“I’m full of secrets,” Caroline said. “The thing with Mary is, she’s working for an airline now and she thinks there’s something going on with their pension fund. People are having money deducted but the numbers don’t add up and…it’s fine for her, but there’s some people she works with it’s not fine for, and she’s tried talking to the right people and they don’t want to hear about it. She knows I’m a bit – let’s say nosy. She thought I could ask around. And I wondered if we could…help?”

“Out of the goodness of our hearts?” said Beverley, who sounded sceptical about this as a motive.

“Or just for fun and profit?” suggested Peter.

“All of those,” said Caroline. “And because you all like it,” Caroline said. “Helping people. Don’t pretend you don’t.”

They all looked at each other.

“As long as it’s not Saturday,” said Abigail. “I really want to move out properly.”

“Okay,” Peter said, finally. He gestured Caroline to the front of the room. “Let’s hear it.”

**Author's Note:**

> Man. Heists are _hard work_ to write. Many thanks to archiesfrog and labellementeuse for being supportive, and to everybody who told me I should do this when I was saying "I'm not going to but IF I DID-" 
> 
> I apologise for all typos and inconsistencies; I really wanted this up before I was incommunicado for a month and then we were six weeks out from the next book, so it's a little rough. 
> 
> Details of the final heist were lifted from [a real theft in London a couple of years ago](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/thieves-rappelled-london-warehouse-in-heist-180962176/). 
> 
> If you're somehow unfamiliar with the television show _Leverage_ , I strongly encourage you to go check it out; the basic theme is What If A Team Of Master Criminals Did Heists For The Greater Good and it's funny and fast-paced and builds incredible character arcs and relationships over five short but sweet seasons as the main cast light flamethrowers instead of cursing the darkness. Plus there's practically a canon OT3.


End file.
